KOCHI: The Kerala government on Wednesday submitted before the High Court that the police required the mobile tower details in order to find out only the location of the Covid-19 patients and the calls they make or receive.
Additional Advocate General KK Ravindranath further submitted that the call detail records received to that extent were erased after 14 days of the quarantine period. The Call Details Records provided by the service providers have various attributes of the call and it was not segregated. The police are collecting the tower location details only to identify the location.
The government made the submission on the petition filed by the leader of opposition Ramesh Chennithala challenging the circular by the State Police Chief Lokanath Behera on the collection of call data records (CDR) of Covid-19 patients.
A Division Bench comprising Chief Justice S Manikumar and Justice Shaji P Chaly directed the government to file a statement in response to the petition. The Bench also observed that the circular had been issued on the specific purpose during Covid-19 unlock 3.0. Prima facie, all the clauses in the circular deal only with Covid-19, its spread and prevention.
T Asaf Ali, counsel for Chennithala submitted that the police were collecting CDRs of Covid19 positive patients and those under quarantine. He further contended that under the guise of preventing the spread of Covid-19, the police may collect all the details of call records of anybody, infringing the right of privacy guaranteed under Article 21 of the Constitution. The police action was an illegal expansion of police powers and it was unconstitutional. The police are not obtained permission from Covid-19 positive patients or those under quarantine before collecting their CDRs.
He pointed out that the state police chief had also directed the additional director general of police, intelligence and police headquarters to take up the matter with BSNL and Vodafone for prompt collection of CDRs. The collected call details were stored by an unknown agency without anonymizing the CDRs. This was against the guidelines issued by the Centre as well as the guidelines issued by the High Court in the Sprinklr case, he further contended.
Leader of the Opposition pointed out in his petition that the police could collect CDRs only during the investigation of grave criminal cases including the threat to national security, financial crime, that too after obtaining permission from the Home Department, subject to check by the Review Committee constituted under Rule 16 of the Indian Telegraph(Amendment) Rules, 2007.
The police, therefore, had no right or authority to collect CDRs of the Covid-19 positive patients and those under quarantine either at their residence or elsewhere, he contended.