NEW DELHI: The Modi government is starting the New Year with the resolve to wipe out terror and it has cracked down on websites that have been carrying anti-India views and spreading the propaganda of the Islamic State (IS).
Reacting to an alert from the anti-terror squad of a state police department, the Department of Telecom (DoT) has blocked access to 32 websites. The DoT order that was tweeted by Pranesh Prakash, policy director of the Bangalore-based research organisation, said that 32 URLs have been blocked under section 69 of the Information and Technology Act, 2000.
The order was reportedly issued on December 16 and it was shared on Twitter on Wednesday. GitHub, Archive.org, Imgur, Vimeo, Daily Motion, Pastebin, sourceforge, justpaste, cryptbin were among the sites that were blocked.
As reports emerged on the ban of these sites, there was outrage on Twitter on the issue of internet censorship. However, most of the websites mentioned in the list that were to be blocked were accessible. Pastebin and Internet Archive, two websites that have reportedly been blocked, tweeted their views.
“If you are from India and unable to visit Pastebin, please email us,” Pastebin tweeted on December 19. Internet Archive tweeted on December 31 that they too received complaints from users in India who can’t access its website.
Reacting to the outrage, Arvind Gupta, national head of the BJP IT Cell took to twitter and said that these sites have been blocked after an alert from an anti-terrorism squad that most of them were carrying anti-India content from the Islamic State (IS).
“We should congratulate the government for taking a preventive and precautionary step in a proactive manner based on an advisory,” Gupta told Mail Today.
He added that he does not have any details of the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) order and only reacted to the Twitter debate on the subject.
Intelligence agencies have been struggling to monitor terror activities on cyber space. There have been reports of terror groups using social media to attract young minds to jehadi ideology.
