State police can't block porn sites, govt tells HC

KOCHI: Pornographic websites are encouraging crime against women; however, state police can't block such websites, home department informed the Kerala high court on Wednesday.
The submission by home department's additional secretary J Jaya came in response to a petition filed by advocate Manoranjan R K of Aluva seeking a ban on porn websites in view of the rise in crimes against women.
It is true that pornography has an effect of encouraging criminal attitude against women as contended by the petitioner, the affidavit stated.
Further, the home department has submitted: "It is further noticed that nowadays occurrence of several crimes in general, and rape in particular, correlated with the increasing availability of pornography in cyberspace."
It is possible that watching porn and obscene contents on a regular basis may initiate increase in number of sexual crimes and offences, the court was told.
Despite these, the Kerala Police doesn't have the power to block porn websites, the affidavit filed through state attorney P Vijayaraghavan stated.
It is true that the cyber cell in Kerala is under the control of the state police chief. At the same time, blocking of sexually offensive pornography websites cannot be done by the state police chief, the affidavit said.
According to the home department, it is a central agency, Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In), that is responsible for blocking porn websites.
The hi-tech crime enquiry cell of the police has identified 652 websites containing pornography, most of which are hosted outside India, and has sent a request to CERT-In to block them, the home department submitted to the court.
The petition filed through advocate Sreelal Warrier seeks a court order to the central government to identify porn websites and block them, claiming that such websites have no good or permissible purpose for their existence.