Answering to a question in the Indian lower house, Lok Sabha, the Minister for Communications and IT, Ravi Shankar Prasad said that “The government has not decided to get servers of popular social networking sites, like hike, Facebook, Twitter etc established within the country” He added that Indian government regularly communicates with these social media websites to resolve the issues like unlawful and hateful content hosted on them. Mr.Prasad added that the security agencies in India face a difficulty in processing the encrypted communications provided by various tracking and surveillance agencies. “There are multifarious aspects involved in security enforcement agencies getting such encrypted communication in readable format such as technical, international relationship, legal and regulatory policy, commercial and security requirements etc,” Prasad added. While accepting that the companies provide encryption services to the end users for privacy and security he added that sometimes they pose a security threat, “At times these services may also used by anti-national and criminal elements, which pose a security threat.” Prasad stated that the Indian government has mandated all the telecom service providers including internet service providers to provide the lawful interception and monitoring facilities to the security agencies for all the services including WhatsApp, Viber, WeChat, Skype etc.
