27
no such Commission has been set up till date, and thus, practices
of authorised/unauthorised surveillance continue to go unnoticed by the citizens.
C.
Pervasive Use of Legal Processes to obtain User Data
28.
On the other hand, the Authorised Agencies of the Central
Government and law enforcement agencies at the State level
have been frequently monitoring communications on the
Internet. In response to a question raised in Rajya Sabha, the
Minister for State for Home Affairs stated that: “The
Security/Intelligence agencies regularly monitor the popular
social media sites and websites and take necessary action in case
of they find any classified material or provocative material or
anti-national or terror related material hosted / circulated on such
sites.” True Copy of the reply of the Minister of State for Home
Affairs in Rajya Sabha dated 19.07.2017 is annexed herewith as
ANNEXURE P-10 (Page No. 129).
29.
Moreover, there has been a huge spike in the number of requests
received from major Internet companies from the law
enforcement agencies for seeking disclosure of personal data of
its customers. The following chart, based on the publicly
available Transparency Reports of these companies, reveals the
total number of requests, along with individual accounts covered
by such requests, received from the enforcement authorities in
India 2017:
2017
NO. OF REQUESTS
ACCOUNTS INVOLVED
GOOGLE
97,838
1,70,608
FACEBOOK
22,024
31,014
576
1,431
TWITTER
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