‘Porn sites blocked to protect women, kids’

Hyderabad: The Department of Information Technology on Friday had passed a directive notifying Internet Service Providers across India to block access to over 800 pornographic websites, stating that the government was concerned about the impact of openly available porn on “users like children, housewives and people who may get offended”.

Though the notice was issued to the Department of Telecom on Friday, users online started noticing that access to pornographic sites was blocked only on Saturday night. One user also posted a screenshot to the discussion forum Reddit that said that the websites were blocked as per “the directions from Department of Telecommunications, Government of India”.

Speaking to the Deccan Chronicle about access to pornographic sites in India being blocked, head of cyber law at the department of information technology B.J. Srinath, said, “We have notified the intermediaries, under Section 79 (3)(b) read with Article 19 (2) of the Constitution, which is related to decency and morality,” he said.

Read: Centre bans internet porn sites

“There is a case in the Supreme Court where the petitioner has been asking for a check on cyber pornography. The government was concerned about the impact of such free and openly available material on users like children, housewives and people who may get offended.”

The department then made the decision to block access to these sites after a list of the websites was provided to them by the petitioners from the Supreme Court case.

Section 79 (3)(b) states that intermediaries, or ISPs, can be asked “to expeditiously remove or disable access to that material on that resource without vitiating the evidence in any manner”, which in this case is being coupled with Article 19 (2) of the Constitution of India that states, “reasonable restrictions can be imposed in the interests of the sovereignty and integrity of India”.

The case that Mr Srinath refers to is a PIL (Kamlesh Vaswani vs. Union of India) that is seeking a blanket ban on pornography, claiming that “most of the offences committed against women/girls/children are fuelled by pornography”.

A Supreme Court Bench had then told additional solicitor general Pinky Anand that the complete ban of pornography would amount to a violation of Article 21 that guarantees the right to personal liberty. The Bench had also remarked that the petitioners had failed to have pornography websites — including child pornography— blocked.

Ms Anand had then said that the government would do “whatever is possible”. Adding that the DoIT had the right to block access to the sites, Mr Srinath said, “The technical decision is a limited action and we are proposing larger changes, to the Supreme Court.”

Citing the example of the UK’s order of “crypt control mechanisms” to limit the accessibility of pornographic material on the Internet, Mr Srinath said that they had only disabled “open access” to these sites, and that people could still freely access them through a Virtual Private Network (VPN), a programme allowing access to blocked sites.