No plan on getting Facebook, Twitter servers to India: Govt

The government on Wednesday said it has not decided to establish servers of websites such as Facebook and Twitter in India, though it regularly interacts with the social networking majors to resolve issues relating to handling of unlawful content on the internet.

"The government has not decided to get servers of popular social networking sites, like Hike, Facebook, Twitter etc established within the country," Communications and IT Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad said in a written reply to Lok Sabha.

He, however, said the government regularly interacts with all stakeholders including social media providers to resolve the issues arising from time to time, related to handling of unlawful content on the internet.

The Minister said security agencies face difficulty while dealing with encrypted communications provided by various service providers.

World over several service providers are providing services like WhatsApp, Viber, WeChat, Skype, Yahoo, Gmail for sharing audio, video, image, email, data and accessing other web services anytime and anywhere in a secure manner, Prasad said.

He added the security of these services is achieved through encryption technology and these services are mostly availed by the citizens across the world through internet.

"At times these services may also used by anti-national and criminal elements, which pose a security threat," the Minister said.

Prasad added the 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 etc.

The Minister said security agencies are able to intercept these encrypted communication services through the lawful interception facilities provided by the telecom operators, but they are not able to decrypt some of encrypted intercepted communication to readable format.

"...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.