Apex Court dismisses petition seeking ban on WhatsApp
NEW DELHI: The Supreme Court on Wednesday dismissed a petition seeking a ban on WhatsApp on the ground that the messaging platform’s end-to-end encryption gives terrorists a means of communication that is impossible to intercept.The petition was filed by a Haryana-based right-to-information (RTI) activist Sudhir Yadav.The petition said WhatsApp has from April started to enable its every message with 256-bit encryption that cannot be broken into.
“Even if WhatsApp was asked to break through an individual’s message to hand over the data to the government, it too would fail as it does not have the decryption keys either,” reported IANS quoting petition.
Seeking a ban on WhatsApp in India, Yadav said any terrorist or criminal can safely chat on WhatsApp and make plans to harm the country and the Indian intelligence agencies would not be able to tap into their conversations to take necessary actions.
‘Before filing the petition, Yadav had written letters to the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) and the Ministry of Communications and IT, but received no reply.
