Twitter Inc. has filed a petition in the Madras High Court expressing its inability to depute a technocrat, on its behalf, to participate in an interactive meeting with the Chief Secretary this week to discuss modalities related to sharing of information sought by the police while probing cyber crimes. It has urged the court to fix it some time during the first week of June.
Filing an affidavit in support of the petition, its authorised signatory Paul Alsdorf from Dublin stated that the company was extremely supportive of the meeting ordered to be held with the Chief Secretary by technocracts of not just Twitter but also those representing WhatsApp, Google, YouTube, Facebook and other social media giants. Considering the importance of the meet, it wanted to depute the right person.
“However, since the petitioner company does not have any corporate presence in India, arrangements are under way to send the most suitable person in terms of experience, knowledge and language capability to attend this meeting on behalf of the petitioner. Mr. Chaitanya Ramachandran, who is the most suitable person to attend this meeting, is not based out of India.
Owing to his prior commitments, he will be available only in first week of June, 2019,” the company said.
On April 25 a Division Bench of Justices S. Manikumar and Subramonium Prasad ordered the conduct of an interactive meeting between May 20 and 27 after the social media giants in-principle agreed to share basic information required by law-enforcers to detect cyber crimes.
They also directed the Union Ministry of External Affairs to facilitate the issuance of visas to the technocrats at the earliest.
The interim order was passed on a public interest litigation petition filed by advocate Antony Clement Rubin who wanted linking of Aadhaar made mandatory to e-mail as well as social media accounts so that those who spread hate messages, circulate obscene videos and indulge in other criminal activities could be identified easily. The Bench doubted whether such a direction for linking Aadhaar with social media accounts could be issued.
Nevertheless, it insisted that social media companies should cooperate with the investigating agencies and issued notices to all of them.
In response, senior counsel Arvind P. Dattar, representing WhatsApp, told the court that it was willing to provide Basic Subscriber Information, including the phone number, name, device information, app version, start date/time, connection status, last connection date/time/IP, e-mail address and web client data.
He, however, insisted that the information should be sought by way of summons as prescribed under Section 91 of the Code of Criminal Procedure and suggested that an interactive meeting be held to sort out the modalities.
Senior Counsel P.S. Raman, representing Google and YouTube, too agreed to cooperate with the police in investigating crimes if request for information was made as per the legal procedures.
On his part, senior counsel R. Murari, representing Twitter, told the court that the police were often writing to its registered office in California, though such requests for information should actually be sent to the grievance officer stationed in Dublin, Ireland. He and senior counsel Satish Parasaran, representing Facebook, also expressed the willingness of their clients to share information required by the police to solve criminal cases.
Mr. Parasaran told the court that Facebook had created a dedicated portal for the police to seek information. After recording their submissions, the judges ordered for the conduct of the interactive meeting to decide upon the niceties involved in sharing information with the police.
They further directed the social media companies to make changes to their mobile applications according to the requirements of individual countries, since Additional Government Pleader E. Manoharan told the court that definitions of obscenity and morality differ from country to country and therefore the social media majors could not apply a standard procedure across the world.
