HC: Take steps to block Proton Mail in India

Bengaluru The Karnataka high court on Tuesday directed the Union government to block Proton Mail, an encrypted email service based in Switzerland and available in India.

A single bench of Justice M Nagaprasanna directed the government to “to issue proceedings in terms of Section 69A of IT Act 2008 read with rule 10 of the Information Technology (Procedure and Safeguards for Blocking Access Of Information By Public) Rules, 2009 to block Proton Mail.”

The court’s direction came on a petition filed by a Bengaluru-based firm, M Moser Design, seeking a direction to the Union ministry of electronics and information technology to ban Proton Mail after its employees and clients received several emails through Proton Mail IDs with morphed pictures, AI generated deepfake images, and sexually explicit content.

Before reserving its orders on Moser Design’s petition, Justice Nagaprasanna had gone through some of such emails received by the firm and observed that the content was akin to “porn” and said since the issue was a serious one, the Centre must be directed to take appropriate steps.

At the time, the court had also asked the Union government why it cannot block all such instant messaging services and Virtual Private Networks (VPN) that do not have physical servers in India and are not amenable to Indian laws.

The petitioner firm had also told the court that in the past, Proton mail had been used to send bomb threats to some schools in India.

It had said that while the local police was already investigating into the matter, it was yet to identify the accused since, Proton had refused to give details of the sender of such emails.

The petitioner firm’s counsel, Jatin Sehgal had told the court that on its website, Proton Mail even guided users on how to bypass monitoring by authorities in India and that it declared that it had removed physical VPNs from India in 2022 after the Union government made it mandatory for VPN providers with servers in India to store user data.

Additional solicitor general of India, Aravind Kamath, who appeared for the Union government, however, had said at the time that while India has a “mutual legal assistance treaty” with Switzerland, since a criminal investigation into the petitioner firm’s police complaint was already on, the investigating officer will now have to follow provisions of the Bharatiya Nagrik Suraksha Sanhita and request the magistrate court to issue a letter rogatory, which is a formal, written request to a court in another country to seek judicial assistance.

However, Kamath had added that if the high court issued specific directions for blocking, the government will comply.

The court had then said it was inclined to exercise its jurisdiction under Article 482 of the CrPC and pass orders. A detailed order of the high court is awaited.