New
Delhi: In what could have been a blow to tech-savvy people, the Supreme Court
on Wednesday dismissed a plea seeking ban on WhatsApp and other
communication applications on security grounds and claiming that
these services violated the law.
Petitioner
Sudhir Yadav said these messenger services violated the provisions of the
Indian Telegraph Act, 1885, and Information Technology Act,
2000. Other than WhatsApp, the petitioner had also named over dozen
other messaging platforms like Hike, Viber, Signal, Telegram and Secure
chat.
In
his petition, Yadav said that terrorists and criminals could easily
communicate on WhatsApp and make plans which are impossible to access even
by supercomputers as decrypting a single 256-bit encrypted message would
take hundreds of years.
“Even
if WhatsApp was asked to break through an individual’s message to hand over the
data to the government, it too will fail as it does not have the decryption
keys,” Yadav said in his petition.
WhatsApp
had introduced end-to-end encryption with their updated version from April
2016.
The
bench headed by Chief Justice T S Thakur and A M Khanwilkar, however,
granted liberty to the petitioner to approach appropriate authority in the
government with his grievances.
It
said the petitioner could also approach Telecom Disputes Settlement and
Appellate Tribunal (TDSAT) with his plea.
However,
WhatsApp’s end-to-end encryption might still be a contentious issue. End-to-end
encryption means encryption at the device level and thus your chats, messages,
videos are not stored on WhatsApp’s servers at all. The only way to access this
data is if your device is compromised and the messages have not been deleted.
This encryption is designed to keep out man-in-the-middle attacks. Given WhatsApp
has over a billion users, this end-to-end encryption is a big deal.
No comments:
Post a Comment