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Was JNU violence planned? HC tells cops to seize phones of students, retrieve chat data
New Delhi: The Delhi high court Tuesday directed the Delhi Police to summon and seize the cellphones of members of two WhatsApp groups, on which the January 5 violence
New Delhi: The Delhi high court Tuesday directed the Delhi Police to summon and seize the cellphones of members of two WhatsApp groups, on which the January 5 violence at the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) was allegedly planned, and retrieve their contents.
The directions came on a plea filed by three JNU teachers — professors Ameet Parameswaran, Atul Sood, and Shukla Vinayak Sawant — through advocate Abhik Chimni seeking preservation of the WhatsApp chat and other relevant data.
Justice Brijesh Sethi directed Google and WhatsApp to preserve and provide data to the Delhi Police to aid their probe into the violence that had broken out on the campus on January 5.
The judge also asked the varsity administration and State Bank of India branch inside the campus to preserve and provide at the earliest the CCTV footage of the violence as requested by the police.
Hindustan Times contacted Google and WhatsApp for comment but got no response till the filing of this copy.
Appearing for the Delhi Police, advocate Rahul Mehra, standing counsel (criminal), Delhi government, informed the court that they had already asked JNU to preserve the footage from all of its 135 CCTV cameras. He said notices have already been sent to WhatsApp to provide data but the company was yet to comply.
He said 37 members of the WhatsApp group —“Unity Against Left” and “Friends of RSS” — have been served notices to join the investigation. In a status report given to the court, Mehra said the CCTV cameras at the gate were not functional because the Central Information System (CIS) was vandalised by the anti-registration group on January 4.
He said a team of experts from the forensic science laboratory, Rohini, has already visited the campus and is making efforts to retrieve the data available. The exercise is to be completed by January 14.
The counsel, representing WhatsApp, told the court that messages are not saved on their server owing to end-to-end encryption of all chats, as per its security protocol. He said the only way the content/ messages of the group can be retrieved is through the members of the group.
The court was also informed that according to a Madras high court judgment, WhatsApp would give only the metadata, including the last IP address of each user.
Following this, the court directed that WhatsApp preserve and provide metadata to the police. It also asked Google to give the chat backups after the counsel said that they will provide them if the police provide them the user IDs.
The counsel for Google told the court that they can provide whatever is available on their system. The judge disposed of the matter with these directions on the plea that the attacks were “premeditated” and “coordinated”, planning for which was allegedly done on the two WhatsApp groups.
