Govt not asking for decrypted data: IT dept official

According to this official, no further consultations will take place on proposed amendments to rules under Section 79 of IT Act, unless required by Union IT Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad.

The latest draft of amendments to the Information Technology (IT) Act will require “proactive monitoring to a very limited extent” and will require companies such as WhatsApp to provide metadata to the government without breaking platform encryption, according to senior official of the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) who is overseeing the draft process.”

“Any proactive monitoring that we are looking for is technically feasible within the encrypted environment,” the official said.

Stating that the government is “not asking for decryption at all”, the official said, “This is wrongly being conveyed in court that we are demanding decryption. Metadata is not encrypted, and so metadata that is relevant, and as required by the government, should be provided. That is a government’s right to know.”

According to this official, no further consultations will take place on proposed amendments to rules under Section 79 of IT Act, unless required by Union IT Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad.

The previous draft, publicly released for consultation in December 2018, stated, “The Intermediary shall deploy technology-based automated tools or appropriate mechanisms, with appropriate controls, for proactively identifying and removing or disabling public access to unlawful information or content.” It also said an intermediary is required to enable tracing the origin of a forwarded information.

After the draft release in December, WhatsApp had stated that these amendments would require the company to “re-architect our systems leading to a different product” and to collect far more data than it does already.

WhatsApp did not respond to questions for this report.”

“Privacy is not absolute,” the official said. “The Supreme Court has said it is a fundamental right but not an absolute right…”

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