Filtering porn sites technical challenge: Telecom Minister

New Delhi: The government has thrown up its hands on filtering pornographic websites, saying it poses “significant technical challenge”.  “These websites keep on changing the names, domain addresses and hosting platforms from time to time, making it difficult to filter or block such websites using technical tools available in the market,” said telecom and IT minister Ravi Shankar Prasad.

He said “‘https’ websites with encrypted content are used to transmit the pornographic content which makes identification of such sites difficult as the data is encrypted. Further, most of the pornographic sites are hosted outside the country, where viewing pornography is legal”.

However, he said child pornography is banned in most of the countries. The minister said that international organisation Interpol maintains a list of “worst-of-list” websites containing most severe child abuse material, which is updated by it on a regular basis.

“Action has been initiated by the government to get the list of child pornography sites from Interpol through the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), which is the nodal agency for interacting with the Interpol. The list of such sites obtained regularly would be taken up for blocking,” he said.

Mr Prasad said that to address the issues effectively, the government is in regular touch with Internet service providers to upgrade their infrastructure and technology to effectively address the shortcomings. “The government is in regular touch with social networking sites, having their offices in India, to disable objectionable contents at the source from their websites”.

 The government has also initiated research and development programmes to deal with technical issues relating to encrypted communications from the point of monitoring and blocking,” he added.