SC to hear plea for banning WhatsApp, Viber, others
24 Jun 2016
A Haryana-based Right to Information activist has filed a Public Interest Litigation in the Supreme Court demanding a ban on social messaging apps like WhatsApp and Viber, saying they pose a major threat to national security.
The PIL has been filed by Sudhir Yadav, an RTI activist, who has urged the apex court to examine the matter thoroughly.
In his petition, Yadav claimed that these messaging apps were helping terrorists and criminal elements by encrypting the messages.
Intercepting such encrypted messages is virtually impossible - a problem investigating agencies on the trail of terrorists admit they are facing.
Even supercomputers can't decipher and intercept these messages. Decrypting a single 256-bit encrypted message would take hundreds of years, Yadav stated.
Such apps - including Whatsapp, Viber, Telegram, Hike and Signal - were thus a threat to national security and should be banned, the petition said.
A bench headed by the Chief Justice of India will hear the case on 29 June.
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