The All India Lawyers’ Union (AILU) called for the withdrawal of the rules for information technology (intermediary guidelines & code of ethics for digital media) in 2021, calling it undemocratic legislation that facilitates absolute surveillance, censorship and digital authoritarianism that violates privacy, personal freedom and liberty the expression of opinion and other fundamental rights of users and sinks the voices of dissenting opinions.
AILU National Vice President S. Rajendra Prasad and National Secretary N. Srinivasa Rao said in a press release that the central government had promulgated the rules despite objections from various civil society organizations, political parties and NGOs.
They claimed that an analysis of the rules reveals a hidden agenda which is to suppress peaceful expression of democratic disagreement with the assistance of social media brokers.
The AILU officials said rule 4 (2) – traceability of users and information – empowers the government through enforcement agencies to tamper with social media intermediaries and break end-to-end encryption in order to track down the “first creators” . Indirectly, it allows the recording and storage of communication and data against the will of the user. Communications can be opened and exposed in total violation of the right to privacy, they claimed.
Rule 5 – Digital Media Regulation – allows law enforcement agencies to block news websites and portals that fail to comply with their orders. The government can use censorship to suppress and crush dissenting opinions and protests against its policies, they claimed.
The rule that provides for automated filtering becomes a tool for massive surveillance by the government in collaboration with the support of social media monopolies, and the user verification rule allows social media companies to run a user verification process with proof of identity like Aadhaar Numbers to be carried out. This leads to a commodification of user data and control.