NEW DELHI: The Supreme Court said it wanted immediate steps to block websites with pornographic content, especially those featuring children.
The court asked the Department of Telecommunication (DoT) about the steps which can be taken in this regard.
A bench headed by Justice BS Chauhan asked the Union Ministry of Communications and Information Technology, of which DoT is a part, to file its response within three weeks
The court was hearing a petition filed by advocate Kamlesh Vaswani who pleaded that although watching obscene videos was not an offence, pornographic sites should be banned as they were one of the major causes behind crimes against women. “The absence of Internet laws encourages people to watch porn videos and over 20 crore videos or clippings are freely available in the market, which have been directly downloaded from the Internet or copied from video CDs,” the petition stated.
Legal experts say the Information Technology Act does not make it illegal to view adult porn but watching child porn is an offence and the law applies to “ whoever creates text or digital images, collects, seeks, browses, downloads’’ child porn.
Referring to Section 67B of the IT Act added in 2008, which prescribes punishment for involvement in sexually explicit online or electronic content that depicts children, cyber law expert Pavan Duggal said: “The problem is that this law has never been invoked yet and till date there has not been any conviction.” The Centre had earlier told the SC that it was difficult to block international porn sites and sought time to consult various ministries in order to find a solution. The court pulled up the Centre for taking such a long time in dealing with a serious issue while granting it time to devise a mechanism to block such sites, particularly those containing child pornography.
The petition pointed out that the sexual content that children are accessing today is far more graphic, violent, brutal, deviant and destructive, and has put the entire society in danger and also poses threats to public order in India.
Govt fails to curb child porn sites
India has of late witnessed a rise in cyber crime but the government, despite having the new IT Act in place, has largely been ineffective in tackling the problem. The Information Technology ministry, which safeguards India’s cyber space, has done little to take action against child porn sites.
The I& B ministry had earlier urged the IT ministry to take necessary steps to prevent the mushrooming of child porn sites. However, a DoT official said in the absence of technology and manpower, it has not been able to take adequate action.
“It is the Constitutional obligation of the government to block porn sites and it cannot get away merely on the ground that it does not have the necessary technology to fight against it,” cyber law expert Pawan Duggal said.
He added that countries like the US and China have constantly been fighting child pornography and they have succeeded in minimising it.
The IT ministry has also been lagging behind in developing an effective and secure network for the government’s use of the Internet. Ministers, top bureaucrats and others in the government largely use Gmail, Yahoo and other foreign webmail portals which have their servers abroad, exposing the risk of their mails being hacked
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