On February 25, the police in Kashmir’s Ganderbal district released a statement saying they had “saved a youth from joining militancy”. The...
On February 25, the police in Kashmir’s Ganderbal district released a statement saying they had “saved a youth from joining militancy”. The 17-year-old had been taken into custody and booked under the draconian Unlawful Activities Prevention Act.
The teenager’s offence: “misusing VPNs” to access social media websites still banned in Kashmir.
Virtual Private Networks, or VPN, allow users to mask their location while browsing the internet. In Kashmir, there has been a surge of interest in VPN applications after the government allowed limited access to 329 websites in January, after six months of a complete internet shutdown.
Keen to clamp down on VPN use, the security forces first resorted to physical checks of smartphones, as multiple Kashmir residents told Scroll.in. Then, on February 17, the Jammu and Kashmir Police’s cyber wing filed a first information report on the alleged “misuse of social media” through VPNs. The FIR invoked the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act and various sections of the Indian Penal Code against unknown persons.
According to police officials, there have been no arrests directly under the cyber police’s FIR. But it has kicked into motion several arrests under FIRs filed at the district level. Scroll.in tracked down at least five cases of arrest since February 17, all for social media and VPN use.
One of...
