Bengaluru, Oct. 18 -- The Supreme Court has said the Union government's Sahyog Portal can provide the "foundation for a national database to detect and remove child sexual exploitation and abuse material (CSEAM) across online platforms". The observation comes as the portal itself faces legal challenges before the Supreme Court and several high courts and the court has called for "coordinated mechanisms to detect and remove" CSEAM from online platforms. In its order passed on October 15, a bench of justices JB Pardiwala and K Vinod Chandran said the Sahyog Portal could provide the "foundation for such a database". The database will contain verified digital fingerprints, known as hashes, and URLs of CSEAM, allowing intermediaries to identify and remove known material across platforms. "We acknowledge that the Sahyog Portal is, no doubt, a step in the right direction. It is also not lost on us that the portal, by virtue of having already onboarded a considerable number of intermediaries, may well be the natural foundation upon which a Hash & URL List Database could be built," the Supreme Court said. The court added that it was aware that the Sahyog portal currently worked only as a common platform for routing individual reports and takedown notices, and so it acts on CSEAM only when each instance is reported. However, the portal could do much more, the court said as long as the Union government "shared its vision" with that of the court's expressed in the present order. "Our expectations from the portal, however, are much more than what it is, as of now, capable of doing, and we are hopeful that the Union of India shares the same vision," it said. To prevent wrongful takedowns, the court said eachentry must undergo multiplelevels of verification, with at least three trained human analysts independently confirming that the material constitutes CSEAM....