The discussions were held ahead of the upcoming hearing before the Supreme Court on a plea by NGO Prajwala highlighting the availability of child porn and rape videos online while seeking measures to check this.
To curb easy availability of online child porn and gang rape videos, the Centre has designated the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) to act on such online content either on the basis of complaints or by taking suo motu cognizance.
On Tuesday, Union Minister of Home Affairs Rajnath Singh and IT Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad held deliberations with NSA Ajit Doval, Union Home Secretary Rajiv Gauba and IB chief Rajiv Jain to urge social media platforms to identify and withdraw such videos on laptops and smartphones.
The discussions were held ahead of the upcoming hearing before the Supreme Court on a plea by NGO Prajwala highlighting the availability of child porn and rape videos online while seeking measures to check this. The apex court in its last hearing had warned social media websites of imposing a fine of Rs 5 lakh each per day till they developed a foolproof mechanism to prevent uploading of objectionable material.
Officials said the meeting chaired by Singh discussed ways to filter objectionable materials, including rape videos on laptops and smartphones.
While there are certain restrictions on accessing child pornography on desktop computers, the search engines and social media have not been able to curb it on laptops and smartphones, officials said. A hash value (code) for all such videos and child sexual abuse material has been generated and shared with the content service provider which is being used to identify such videos online.
NCRB has been mandated to launch an online portal for receiving complaints and acting on them. Under section 79 of the IT Act, 2000, the MHA designated “NCRB, to be the agency of the Ministry of Home Affairs to perform the functions under clause (b) of sub-section (3) of section 79 of Information Technology Act, 2000 and to notify the instances…” as per the order issued on August 13, 2018.
“A list of 500 key words used in searching such child porn and rape videos has also been compiled and will be shared with the ISPs, including Google, Yahoo, Facebook, WhatsApp and Microsoft,” said an official.
However, States urged the Centre to bring amendments to the Information Technology Act, 2000 and authorize a sub inspector (SI) level officer to investigate cases under IT Act. Only an inspector level officer can investigate IT related offences.