Supreme Court rejects plea to ban WhatsApp

The petition has been dismissed by the bench of the CJI. Sudhir Yadav, a Haryana-based right-to-information (RTI) activist who had filed the plea, has been asked to approach the appropriate authority or tribunal. 

The petition said WhatsApp had enabled every message with a 256-bit encryption that cannot be broken into. Yadav had claimed that endto-end encryption threatens national security.“Even if WhatsApp was asked to break through an individual’s message to hand over the data to the government, it too would fail as it does not have the decryption keys either,” Yadav said in his petition. 

Seeking a ban on WhatsApp in India, Yadav said any terrorist or criminal can safely chat on WhatsApp and make plans to harm the country and the Indian intelligence agencies would not be able to tap into their conversations to take necessary actions.