1984

[winnie_the_pooh]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/ju ... hone-email

India to let government officials access private phone calls and emails
Security agencies will not need court approval to access data under new surveillance programme, say sources

Reuters in New Delhi
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 20 June 2013 10.14 BST

A woman talks on her mobile on a Mumbai train. The government can listen to and tape calls under the new system, say officials. Photograph: Navesh Chitrakar/Reuters
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 emails and phone calls without oversight by courts or parliament, several sources say.

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 have set off a global furore.

"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, a 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 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.

The interior ministry spokesman KS 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.

Indian 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 emails 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 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 US.

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 federal interior ministry and his state-level deputies will have the power to approve requests for surveillance of specific phone numbers, emails 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.

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 emails, 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, India's Outlook news magazine accused intelligence officials of tapping telephone calls of several politicians, including a government minister. The accusations were never proved, but led to a political uproar.

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 this month.

[inplainsight]

I'm actually surprised that it took them so long.

[goodboy_mentor]

Slow and steady formal transformation of a banana republic into becoming a complete Police State with no accountability-

India’s surveillance project may be as lethal as PRISM

Project documents relating to the new Centralized Monitoring System (CMS) reveal the government’s lethal and all-encompassing surveillance capabilities, which, without the assurance of a matching legal and procedural framework to protect privacy, threaten to be as intrusive as the U.S. government’s controversial PRISM project.

These capabilities are being built even as a debate rages on the extent to which the privacy of Indian Internet and social media users was compromised by the PRISM project. A PIL petition on the subject has already been admitted by the Supreme Court.

The documents in the possession of The Hindu indicate that the CMS project now has a budgeted commitment nearly double that of the Rs. 400-crore estimate that senior officials mentioned in a recent briefing to the media. Once implemented, the CMS will enhance the government’s surveillance and interception capabilities far beyond ‘meta-data,’ data mining, and the original expectation of “instant” and secure interception of phone conversations.

The interception flow diagram, hitherto under wraps, reveals that the CMS being set up by C-DoT — an obscure government enterprise located on the outskirts of New Delhi — will have the capability to monitor and deliver Intercept Relating Information (IRI) across 900 million mobile (GSM and CDMA) and fixed (PSTN) lines as well as 160 million Internet users, on a ‘real time’ basis through secure ethernet leased lines.

The CMS will have unfettered access to the existing Lawful Interception Systems (LIS), currently installed in the network of every fixed and mobile operator, ISP, and International Long Distance service provider. Mobile and long distance operators, who were required to ensure interception only after they were in receipt of the “authorisation,” will no longer be in the picture. With CMS, all authorisations remain secret within government departments.

This means that government agencies can access in real time any mobile and fixed line phone conversation, SMS, fax, web-site visit, social media usage, Internet search and email, including partially written emails in draft folders, of “targeted numbers.” This is because, contrary to the impression that the CMS was replacing the existing surveillance equipment deployed by mobile operators and ISPs, it would actually combine the strength of two — expanding the CMS’s forensic capabilities multiple times.

Even where data mining and ‘meta-data’ access through call data records (CDRs) and session initiation protocol data records (SDRs) — used for Internet protocol-related communications including video conferencing, streaming multi-media, instant messaging, presence information, file transfer, video games and voice & fax over IP is concerned — the CMS will have unmatched capabilities of deep search surveillance and monitoring. The CMS is designed to have access to call content (CC) on multiple E1 leased lines through operators ‘billing/ mediation servers’. These servers will reveal user information to the accuracy of milliseconds, relating to call duration, identification and call history of those under surveillance. Additionally, it will disclose mobile numbers and email IDs, including pinpointing the target’s physical location by revealing cellphone tower information.

Nationwide surveillance

The Hindu’s investigation has also unveiled the mystery relating to the CMS’s national rollout. Contrary to reports about it being active nationwide, only Delhi and Haryana have tested “proof of concept” (POC) successfully. Kerala, Karnataka and Kolkata are the next three destinations for CMS’s implementation. Till 2015, two surveillance and interception systems will run in parallel — the existing State-wise, 200-odd Lawful Intercept and Monitoring (LIM) Systems, set up by 7 to 8 mobile operators in each of the 22 circles, plus the multiple ISP and international gateways — alongside the national rollout of CMS. The aim is to cover approximately one dozen States by the end of 2013-14.

On November 26, 2009, the government told Parliament that CMS’s implementation would overcome “the existing system’s secrecy which can be easily compromised due to manual interventions at many stages.” In January 2012, the government had admitted to intercepting over 1 lakh phones and communication devices over a year, at a rate of 7,500–9,000 per month.

Privacy vs. security

Currently two government spy agencies — the Intelligence Bureau (IB), and the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) — plus seven others, including the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), the Narcotics Control Bureau, DRI, National Intelligence Agency, CBDT (tax authority), Military Intelligence of Assam and JK and Home Ministry — are authorised to intercept and monitor citizens’ calls and emails, under the guidelines laid down by the Supreme Court, The Indian Telegraph Act 1985, Rule 419(A) and other related legislation.

Given the major technological advancements in monitoring and enhanced forensic capabilities in surveillance, coupled with the change in procedure which mandates the interception authorization to be kept secret between two government departments with no scope of a transparent public disclosure of who is being monitored, for what purpose and for how long, privacy and free speech activists are protesting and raising many questions. The government, meanwhile, is proceeding undeterred.

Source http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/i ... 834619.ece

[Skyman]

Wonder who is reading our opinions now...?

[mundaire]

The most amazing thing is that there is almost NO media hue & cry about what is a blatant instance of 'murder' of civil liberties and individual rights!

To put it in perspective, just a few days back I was reading an article about how TRAI (the Indian telecom regulator) has been given the additional responsibility of working out a formula/ policy to ensure that business houses who own media outlets DO NOT exercise undue influence on editorial policy. Of course it makes one wonder about a few things -

a) Why is a telecom regulator tasked with this, which is something one would imagine is to do with the Information & Broadcasting Ministry? That too a regulator which DOES NOT enjoy an unblemished track record. Could this be another way to exercise control on media?

b) If business (read the owners) influence on media is bad, WHY PRAY do we still have a CENSOR BOARD in India? By the same measure isn't Govt. influence bad too? In the same vein why does a (supposedly) FREE country (ours) have more banned publications/ films/ books/ etc. than any other nation on earth apart from (an unabashedly communist oligarchy) China?

c) If the press can be influenced by business interests (which is agreeably bad for impartial reporting), isn't Govt. influence on media (via various methods of coercion/ bribing through favours of the business owners/ editorial staff) bad as well?

d) In a country where our government spends MANY TIMES more of YOUR & MY hard earned money (paid through taxes) on populist welfare schemes which the nation can ill afford and offer nothing tangible in return to society (except maybe some popularity gained by the ruling party at our collective expense) AS OPPOSED TO what is spent on PRIMARY EDUCATION which anyone will tell you is a KEY DRIVER for building a nation on the path to progress - it comes as no surprise that more people aren't raising their voices against this, after all if you don't even know enough to realise you have certain natural rights, how would you realise that they have been taken away from you?

[Vikram]

I cringe even when I am using google for everyday searches.This makes me positively shudder. More than these powers, our judiciary's lethargy and complexity and our police's disregard on the whole for law or their unique understanding of the nature of law makes it very dangerous.


Best-
Vikram

[Sakobav]

PRISM is US program for tracking information and I saw a demo of a software that's used by that program. The speed at which it linked entities and folks and searches it did even showing networks between folks was amazing. Taken in all context this data being collected if its stored and processed like PRISM does its a very powerful tool which can be used for good or bad by the govt!!

[goodboy_mentor]

its a very powerful tool which can be used for good or bad by the govt!!

Combine it with UID, Human DNA Profiling Bill (April 2012) and the State having unwritten policy of torture and extra judicial killings!! It is a dreamland come true for Hitler, Mao or Stalin.

[Skyman]

I have always suspected it would more and more inconvenient to not have the UID.Now, it is no gas subsidy without it.Later it might be health care and whatnot.

[goodboy_mentor]

I have always suspected it would more and more inconvenient to not have the UID.Now, it is no gas subsidy without it.Later it might be health care and whatnot.

To get an UID give your fingerprints and other personal body statistics just like a prisnor has to in 'Identification of Prisoners Act, 1920? Then where is the difference between an upright citizen and a prisoner? Is this what our Constitution desires?