You may scorn porn, but can't wish it away

Exclusive search engine may hit efforts to check obscene content

While a Committee on Petitions of the Rajya Sabha is considering to put a check on cyber pornography by amending the Information Technology Act, a recently launched exclusive search engine for pornographic content has raised eyebrows among law enforcement agencies here. 

The search engine, launched in the US by two ex-employees of a leading search engine, promises anonymous pornographic content search. Experts say the anonymity aspect is in violation of the provisions of the IT Act. 

Section 67 (b) prohibits publishing or transmitting of material depicting children in sexually explicit act. The police here say that besides child pornography, there are other aspects which are prohibited under the IT Act. 

“Anonymity may have been offered by this search engine as a marketing gimmick since IP-spoofed proxy servers are already in use to hide the content viewed. However, no action is being taken as of now to block such websites or search engines,” a senior police official said. 

Recently, the Bangalore police had seized porn contents from a person arrested in Vibgyor High school in the rape case. Though the police released him in the Vibgyor case, they concluded that he was involved in a sexual abuse case in a school where he was working earlier. 

Section 79 of the IT Act, along with the rules notified in April 2011, has specific “due diligence mandate” which includes steps to prevent posting of any obscene content on websites. However, no action has been taken so far to fight illegal content, say cyber law experts.

“If more than 74,000 viruses and 20 million malwares can be pinned down every day, it is not impossible to eliminate cyber pornography at least from India. There has to be a mechanism for reporting pornographic URLs and development of a central database of all such reports. Later, all the Internet Service Providers (ISPs) may create a black list of URLs. But the industry is against the idea, since banning pornography will reduce Internet traffic and also eliminate an important channel of virus contribution,” opined cyber law expert N Vijayshankar.