The Karnataka High Court has issued guidelines to resume online video conferencing of court proceedings from Monday, Live Law reported.
The court had stopped streaming hearings after unknown miscreants logged into the court’s Zoom meeting platform and played pornographic video content in six courtrooms on December 4 and December 5.
Under the new guidelines issued on December 9, the video conferencing services will be resumed on a pilot basis. All participants including advocates and litigants will need to sign themselves into the virtual meeting platform as a one-time measure before they can enter the hearings.
Identifying details like names and relevant case or list numbers will need to be given beforehand. Media persons will have to declare their name and that of their organisation. Participants based overseas will need to seek permission in advance from the Registrar Judicial of the High Court.
Following the cyber security breaches in the first week of December, the Karnataka Police registered a first information report on a complaint by the High Court’s administration. The miscreants were booked under Sections 67 and 67(A) of the Information Technology Act. The provisions pertain to publishing or transmitting obscene or sexually explicit material in electronic form.
One of the servers used to host the court’s video streams were based in Bangladesh while another is based in India, The Hindu reported quoting an unidentified police official. “We have accessed the IP addresses of the systems from where the attacks originated,” the newspaper quoted the senior official as saying.
This is the first time that the court had suspended the streaming service after it was introduced during the Covid-19 induced pandemic in March 2020.
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