Cyber crime portal launched, over 1.06 L visitors till now: Centre to SC

The Centre Wednesday informed the Supreme Court that a cyber crime portal has been launched and over 1.06 lakhs persons have visited the website till Wednesday.

Indicating the actions taken by the Ministry of Home Affairs in compliance with the apex court's directions, the Centre told the court that nodal officer and one level above officers have been nominated by all the states and the Union Territories for redressing grievances raised by the citizens.

"All India awareness campaign on radio for promoting use of cyber crime reporting portal and other cyber crime against women and children will start from first week of December," the government told a bench comprising Justices Madan B Lokur and U U Lalit.

Solicitor General Tushar Mehta told the bench that they had held meetings with intermediaries on November 11 and November 26 and a standard operating procedure (SoP) for handling complaint has been finalised by taking their inputs into consideration.

"Draft agreement has been sent to the National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) on November 19 this year to access cyber tipline reports regarding missing and exploited children. Their reply is awaited," he said.

Mehta told the court that there were certain actions which were required to be taken by the intermediaries like setting up pro-active monitoring tools for auto deletion of unlawful content by deploying artificial intelligence based tools.

He said intermediaries have to take actions regarding "deployment of trusted flaggers for identifying and deletion of unlawful content" and "setting up of 24X7 mechanism for dealing with requisitions of law enforcement agencies".

Mehta said that beside this, intermediaries have to appoint India based contact officer and escalation officers and should have "prompt disposal of requisitions of law enforcement agencies to remove unlawful contents".

The bench has posted the matter for further hearing on December 6.

The apex court had earlier fixed November 15 as deadline for the Centre to finalise a SoP for a cyber portal to handle complaints regarding child pornography, child sexual abuse, rapes and obscene content on the Internet.

The court was hearing a matter following a letter sent in 2015 to then Chief Justice of India H L Dattu by Hyderabad-based NGO Prajwala, along with two rape videos in a pen-drive.

The court had on its own taken cognisance of the letter and asked the CBI to launch a probe to apprehend the culprits.

The NGO's letter had also mooted the idea of maintaining a national sex offenders' register which should contain details of persons convicted for offences like eve-teasing, stalking, molestation and other sexual assaults.