Kamal Ghorui
NEW DELHI: Virtual proceedings before the chief justice of Delhi High Court were disrupted thrice on Wednesday after a person logged in and played pornographic content.At one stage, a participant under the name ‘Sh*tjeet Sighn’ played an obscene video. At the same point, an audio in the background announced, “Shut down the meeting right now. You’ve been hacked.“The repeated interruptions prompted the bench to immediately suspend the virtual proceedings – it was dealing with a clutch of PILs – and break for lunch.The incident raises concerns about the security and resilience of the videoconferencing system used by the court. Hosted on the Cisco Webex platform, the virtual hearings allow lawyers, govt officials, litigants and media to enter their email IDs and log in to either watch or make arguments in case they are party to a matter.While the final control to permit virtual entry to such proceedings remains with the court master of each court, no one is usually barred from viewing proceedings as long as a user is muted and doesn’t create a disturbance. However, the option to share content remains disabled, which appears to have been breached on Wednesday.When the high court assembled after lunch, Chief Justice D K Upadhyaya shared his concerns about circulation and dissemination of the recordings of the incident. The meetings were also kept in locked mode even as the chief justice said that directions have been issued to the registrar general on the administrative side of the matter. He underlined that recording of court proceedings is prohibited under high court rules, and if any unauthorised content is circulated, the authorities would detect it.The court administration reported the incident to Delhi Police’s Intelligence Fusion & Strategic Operations (IFSO) unit, which deals with cybercrime, for a thorough investigation into the online breach.In 2024, Supreme Court had temporarily disabled its YouTube channel after it was allegedly hacked and used to broadcast videos promoting a cryptocurrency. In that case, the hackers renamed the channel and streamed the unauthorised videos, before corrective action was taken.The country’s higher judiciary has significantly expanded its digital and virtual hearing systems in recent years under the e-Courts project. Live streaming and video conferencing have become central to judicial accessibility, particularly after the Covid-19 pandemic accelerated adoption of virtual proceedings.
