New Delhi: The government has reiterated its stand in favour of traceability, making it clear that social media platforms like WhatsApp must "reengineer their platforms" if need be to help law enforcement agencies trace the origin of messages that are creating any law and order issue, official sources told ET.Facebook-owned WhatsApp has taken the government to court challenging the traceability mandate in the new Intermediary Guidelines. But, in recent meeting with social media platforms including Facebook and Twitter, the Ministry of Electronics and IT has stood its ground arguing that “traceability has nothing to do with breaking end-to-end encryption”, is very “much possible” and is an “absolute necessity” for national security and law and order in the country.The reiteration comes after the ministry had a change of guard with Ashwini Vaishnaw taking over as the union minister for electronics and IT, along with Rajeev Chandrasekhar as the junior minister. Chandrasekhar, a technocrat-turned-politician, had a series of meetings with top technology and Internet firms in the last few weeks. Those he met recently included Facebook India managing director Ajit Mohan and its public policy director, Shivnath Thukral. He also held a virtual interaction with the global and India public policy team at Twitter which included its global policy chief, Vijaya Gadde.“Our mandate is user safety and a safe and trusted Internet. If that is the objective, how can traceability not be part of our toolkit,” a top government official told ET, adding that the message has been communicated to the companies clearly in the recent meetings.The official added that the demand for traceability has nothing to do with breaking encryption. “You as an intermediary should tag every packet that originates on your platform and should be able to go back to something that is illegal. You should find a way to do it,” added the official, saying that if the platform has some other solution which meets the objective, the government has no issues with it.He also said that the ministry’s key focus area under the new leadership is to ensure that India has an "open" Internet which is based on "trust" and user safety and that privacy is key.“The Internet in India will be open, trusted, safe and accountable. So, it will be open unlike China. It will be free from government interference, because that's the narrative which is being put out there, but it will be trusted, which means user safety will be paramount. And Big Tech will be accountable not to the state but to the users,” the official said.WhatsApp did not respond to ET's queries.The ministry has been involved in a serious face-off with platforms like Twitter over compliance of the new Intermediary Guidelines that came into effect from May. While platforms like WhatsApp have not disputed any of the other mandates under the new rules, they have said the traceability requirement will force them to break the end-to-end encryption, compromising user privacy.“Our approach is very clear and we have communicated to all those that we have met. There will be no confrontation, nobody is a policeman. We are interested in achieving the objective of a trillion dollar digital economy and we consider every platform, technology company and manufacturing technology company a stakeholder in that journey,” the official said.The person added that the government will “roll out the red carpet” for everyone. But they need to comply with certain things which ensure that guaranteed fundamental rights to citizens of India are met.“We have the right to not be discriminated against under Article 14, right to free speech under Article 19 and right to privacy under Article 21. We cannot allow any platform to strip those rights from users,” the official said. IT Rules are about user’s safety and about ensuring responsibility of intermediaries to their users and there is no government in that, the official added.
from Economic Times https://ift.tt/3kZ7hj6
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