India
has launched a wide ranging surveillance programme that will give its
security agencies and even income tax officials the ability to tap
directly into e-mails and phone calls without oversight by courts or
parliament, several sources said.
The expanded surveillance in
the world's most populous democracy, which the government says will help
safeguard national security, has alarmed privacy advocates at a time
when allegations of massive US digital snooping beyond American shores
has 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
authorized 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
government started to quietly roll the system out state by state in
April 2013, 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.
Home ministry
spokesman K.S. Dhatwalia said he did not have details of CMS and
therefore could not comment on the privacy concerns. A spokeswoman for
the 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.
No independent oversightThe
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 for user data, the highest in the world after the United States.
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 government officials said.
Government
intercept data servers are being built on the premises of private
telecommunications firms. These will allow the government to tap into
communications at will without telling the service providers, according
to the officials and public documents.
The top bureaucrat in the
home ministry and his state-level deputies will have the power to
approve requests for surveillance of specific phone numbers, e-mails or
social media accounts, the government officials said.
While it is
not unusual for governments to have equipment at telecommunication
companies and service providers, they are usually required to submit
warrants or be subject to other forms of independent oversight.
"Bypassing
courts is really very dangerous and can be easily misused," said Pawan
Sinha, who teaches human rights at Delhi University. In most countries
in Europe and in the United States, security agencies were obliged to
seek court approval or had to function with legal oversight, he said.
The senior telecommunications ministry official dismissed suggestions that India's system could be open to abuse.
"The
home secretary has to have some substantial intelligence input to
approve any kind of call tapping or call monitoring. He is not going to
randomly decide to tape anybody's phone calls," he said.
"If at
all the government reads your e-mails, or taps your phone, that will be
done for a good reason. It is not invading your privacy, it is
protecting you and your country," he said.
The government has arrested people in the past for critical social media posts although there have been no prosecutions.
In
2010, Outlook news magazine accused intelligence officials of tapping
telephone calls of several politicians, including a government minister.
The accusations were never proven, but led to a political uproar.
No privacy law"The
many abuses of phone tapping make clear that that is not a good way to
organise the system of checks and balances," said Anja Kovacs, a fellow
at the New Delhi-based Centre for Internet and Society.
"When
similar rules are used for even more extensive monitoring and
surveillance, as seems to be the case with CMS, the dangers of abuse and
their implications for individuals are even bigger."
Nine
government agencies will be authorised to make intercept requests,
including the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), India's elite
policy agency, the Intelligence Bureau (IB), the domestic spy agency,
and the income tax department.
India does not have a formal
privacy law and the new surveillance system will operate under the
Indian Telegraph Act a law formulated by the British in 1885 which gives
the government freedom to monitor private conversations.
"We are
obligated by law to give access to our networks to every legal
enforcement agency," said Rajan Mathews, director general of the
Cellular Operators Association of India.
Telecommunications
companies Bharti Airtel , Vodafone's India unit, Idea Cellular , Tata
Communications and state-run MTNL did not respond to requests for
comment.
India has a long history of violence by separatist
groups and other militants within its borders. More than one third of
India's 670 districts are affected by such violence, according to the
South Asia Terrorism Portal.
The government has escalated efforts
to monitor the activities of militant groups since a Pakistan-based
militant squad rampaged through Mumbai in 2008, killing 166 people.
Monitoring of telephones and the Internet are part of the surveillance.
India's
junior minister for information technology, Milind Deora, said the new
data collection system would actually improve citizens' privacy because
telecommunications companies would no longer be directly involved in the
surveillance - only government officials would.
"The mobile
company will have no knowledge about whose phone conversation is being
intercepted", Deora told a Google Hangout, an online forum, earlier in
June.
Bangalore:
Facebook is secretly working on a project to become a newspaper for
mobile devices. The project internally called as Reader, will display
content from Facebook users and publishers in a new UI tailored for
mobile devices, reports The Wall Street Journal.
Bangalore:
In a move to increase the penetration of android devices in India, the
global leader in mobile platform, Google is set to launch its own store
fronts ‘Android Nation’ in India, reports Economic Times.
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