Privacy And Protection Possible

Context: It may be time to examine all issues related to new IT Rules in totality, while upholding Indian citizens constitutionally mandated right to privacy and life.

Arguments by Government for enforcing traceability

• Potential misuse: Messaging platforms can be used for terrorism, crime and child abuse.
• Possible to enforce traceability without breaking encryption: Some experts claim this since WhatsApp can already identify a message being forwarded or not.

Issues in enforcing traceability requirement under new IT Rules

• Not possible without breaking encryption: This will render entire platform vulnerable to hacking.
• Technical challenges: WhatsApp uses encryption protocol used by makers of Signal messaging application, which makes it impossible to add originator feature.
• WhatsApp encryption also uses constantly rotating encryption keys per message, which remains only between sender and receiver.
• The current architecture of encryption is to ensure deniability, which means any attempt to scrutiny is bound to fail. This is called ‘Open Whisper’.
• Global administration challenges: Other countries may not allow their citizens to be tracked as originators of a message
• Doubts over violation of fundamental right to privacy: it is essential for the State to prevent terror attacks, but cannot undermine the fundamental right to privacy.

Way forward

• Put in place regulatory laws upholding citizen’s right to privacy: In Australia, Telecommunications and Other Legislation Amendment (TOLA) Act 2018 enabled its government with adequate checks, seek information from technology companies and decrypt communications.
• Multi-layered mechanism: Like Parliamentary joint committee in Australia which oversees all intelligence and related security functions.
• Reform India’s police and intelligence: strengthen police and intelligence apparatus
• Need to check all other similar technology platforms: 
  • Most arrested in India for joining Islamic State (IS) were introduced to messaging platforms like ChatSecure, Threema, Viber and Telegram, which have very little public visibility in India.
  • The 26/11 terrorist attacks in 2008 were carried out using Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) to direct the attacks.