Observations of the Committee

♤ It was of the opinion that it was more effective to insert the substantive provisions in the IPC instead of the IT Act, since the IT Act was primarily concerned with e-commerce regulation.

♤ Section 78 of the IT Act primarily ‘dealt with capacity building’ and needs to be relooked to sensitize the officers and give them support with electronic expertise, computer- forensics and digital-forensics.

♤ It has recommended amendments in CrPC to enable each state to have a State Cyber Crime Coordinator (Sec 25B) and a District Cyber Crime Cell (Sec 25C).

♤ The offensive speech should be “highly disparaging, abusive or inflammatory against any person or group of persons”, and should be uttered with the intention to cause “fear of injury or alarm”.

♤ The committee also expressed the desirability of having guidelines in place to prevent the abuse of provisions by investigation agencies and to safeguard innocent users of social media.

♤ Many recommendations were taken from the Law Commission report, which are-

o Insertion of Section 153C to prohibit incitement of hatred through online speech on grounds of religion, caste, community, gender, sexual orientation, tribe, language, place of birth etc.

o Section 505A was proposed to be inserted by the Law Commission to prevent causing of alarm, fear, provocation of violence etc. on grounds of identity.

o It was clarified that the need for intent has to be established.