[mukto-mona] India sets up system to tap phone calls, email

Looks like India is following America here. Again the law itself does not deserve much criticism but it would be interesting how it will be used. Chance for India to stand out in the world stage.

Shalom!


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India sets up system to tap phone calls, email
Reuters Asia

The CMS will be able to target any of India's 900 million landline and mobile phone subscribers and 120 million internet users

• A man checks his mobile phone near a marketplace in New Delhi June 
  Photo- Reuters

The expanded surveillance in the world's most populous democracy, which its government says will help safeguard national security, has alarmed privacy advocates at a time when allegations of massive US digital snooping beyond American shores have set off a global furor.

"If India doesn't want to look like an authoritarian regime, it needs to be transparent about who will be authorised to collect data, what data will be collected, how it will be used, and how the right to privacy will be protected," said Cynthia Wong, an internet researcher at New York-based Human Rights Watch.

The Central Monitoring System (CMS) was announced in 2011 but there has been no public debate and the government has said little about how it will work or how it will ensure that the system is not abused.

The Indian government started to quietly roll the system out state by state in April this year, according to government officials.

Eventually it will be able to target any of India's 900 million landline and mobile phone subscribers and 120 million internet users.

Indian home ministry spokesman KS Dhatwalia said he did not have details of CMS and therefore could not comment on the privacy concerns. A spokeswoman for India's telecommunications ministry, which will oversee CMS, did not respond to queries.

Officials said making details of the project public would limit its effectiveness as a clandestine intelligence-gathering tool.

"Security of the country is very important. All countries have these surveillance programmes," said a senior telecommunications ministry official, defending the need for a large-scale eavesdropping system like CMS.

"You can see terrorists getting caught, you see crimes being stopped. You need surveillance. This is to protect you and your country," said the official, who is directly involved in setting up the project. He did not want to be identified because of the sensitivity of the subject.

The new system will allow the government to listen to and tape phone conversations, read e-mails and text messages, monitor posts on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn and track searches on Google of selected targets, according to interviews with two other officials involved in setting up the new surveillance programme, human rights activists and cyber experts.

In 2012, India sent in 4,750 requests to Google Inc for user data, the highest in the world after the US.

Indian security agencies will no longer need to seek a court order for surveillance or depend, as they do now, on internet or telephone service providers to give them the data, the Indian government officials said.

Government intercept data servers are being built on the premises of private telecommunications firms. These will allow the Indian government to tap into communications at will without telling the service providers, according to the officials and public documents.

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