Fake photos of women online: IT minister orders investigation, FIR is registered


The government has asked its cybersecurity and law enforcement agencies to investigate complaints that a website hosted spoofed images and objectionable comments “aimed at insulting Muslim women.”

India’s Computer Emergency Response System (Cert-In), the national hub for monitoring cybersecurity incidents and related threats, has been asked to form a ‘high-level committee’ to investigate the incident and coordinate with cyber cells. state police forces, senior government officials said.

Late Saturday night, Electronics and Information Technology Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw tweeted that GitHub, the coding platform the said app was hosted on, had blocked the user, and that Cert- In and the police were “coordinating other actions.”
On Sunday, in a separate tweet, Vaishnaw said the government “is working with police organizations in Delhi and Mumbai on this issue.”

Delhi police said on Saturday they had received a complaint from a Delhi-based journalist and were “looking into the matter” to take “appropriate legal action.” An FIR was registered on Sunday at his cyber cell police station in the Southeast District.

Twitter suspended an account that shared links to the app hosted on GitHub. The Twitter handle had the same name as the objectionable app. Twitter did not respond to emails seeking comment on the account and its suspension.

Earlier in June 2021, another app with a similar name to the one currently under investigation appeared on GitHub with photos of Muslim women captioned “Deal of the Day.”

On July 7 and 8, police in Noida and Delhi had registered separate FIRs against strangers, but investigations have not progressed since.

Trapped photos of at least 100 Muslim women, along with obscene remarks and comments, were posted online this week. GitHub then removed the content, but many Twitter users tagged the women and posted screenshots of the webpage.

In her police complaint on Saturday, the Delhi-based journalist accused strangers of promoting enmity, sexual harassment and insulting women.

“I was shocked to discover… that a website / portal… had a distorted image of me in an inappropriate, unacceptable and clearly obscene context… The… content… is clearly intended to insult Muslim women… and all of the website appears to have been designed with the intention of embarrassing and insulting Muslim women, ”she said.

“This is nothing less than online harassment and the tweet referred to here is itself liable to criminal prosecution. The so-called ‘GitHub’ is violent, threatening and aims to create a sense of fear and shame in my mind as well as in the minds of women in general and the Muslim community, whose women are targeted in this hateful manner. In fact, this website targets other Muslim women as well… “the complaint reads.

Based on the complaint, a case falling under sections 153A of the IPC (promoting enmity between different groups on religious grounds and committing acts detrimental to the maintenance of harmony), 153B (imputations, assertions prejudicial to the national integration), 354A (sexual harassment) and 509 (word, gesture or act aimed at insulting a woman’s modesty) were recorded.

Cyber ​​cell sources claimed to have identified some accounts related to the objectionable messages, which were disabled following the police complaint.

Many of the women targeted had also been targeted in the previous case. A senior Delhi police officer said the previous case was at a standstill because GitHub failed to cooperate.

“We wrote to them and sent them a legal opinion on the matter. GitHub officials asked us to follow the MLAT (Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty) guidelines and we again insisted on a response, but we did not receive the same, ”the officer said.

Another Delhi-based reporter told the Indian Express on Sunday that she discovered her spoofed images on GitHub on Friday.

“I was tagged in a Twitter post where a man posted a screenshot of the app with my photo and obscene comments. People who commented on his post made vulgar remarks… They took my photo posting on Twitter and used it that way. My friends had contacted police in Gurgaon and Delhi six months ago. None of us have ever been called for questioning or updating. My friend never even received the copy of FIR, ”she said.

Another woman, an activist based in the capital, said: “These men were trying to auction us off and were discussing our rates on the (previous) app. Now this is a (new) way to torture us again… I filed a complaint with Noida and the Delhi Police but no one called me for questioning.