SCIENCENVIRO: Phone Tapping & Passive Interception - A comprehensive coverage

 

The government's listening to us

• In the summer of 1999, an officer at a Research and Analysis Wing communications station in western India flipped a switch, and helped change the course of the Kargil conflict.
• India's strategic community finally awoke to the possibilities of modern communications intelligence, and unleashed a massive effort to upgrade the country's technical capabilities.
• A new organisation, the National Technical Research Organisation (NTRO), was set up
• Late into the night the 26/11 attacks began in Mumbai, that investment paid off: equipment flown in from New Delhi by the Intelligence Bureau allowed investigators to intercept the assault team's communications with the Lashkar-e-Taiba's headquarters in Pakistan.
• Police forces across the country have since scrambled to purchase similar equipment
• But this isn't good news: India has no appropriate legal framework to regulate its vast, and growing, communications intelligence capabilities.
• Himachal Pradesh-based Shoghi — once blacklisted by the government pending investigation of its relationship with corruption-linked former telecommunications Minister Sukh Ram — has become one of the largest suppliers to the Indian armed forces and RAW.
• The company also claims its equipment can automatically analyse “bulk speech data” — in other words, listen in and pick particular languages, words, or even voices out of millions of simultaneous conversations taking place across the world.
• India's other large communications intelligence firm, Indore-headquartered ClearTrail
• The company's brochures say it has portable equipment that can pluck mobile phone voice and text messages off the air, without the support of service providers — service providers who must, by law, be served with legal authorisation to allow monitoring.
• Ever since 26/11, companies like Shoghi and ClearTrail haven't been short of customers: police forces have queued up to purchase passive interception technologies
• There are even cases of out-of-state operations: the Delhi Police have periodically maintained a passive interception capability at the Awantipora military station in Jammu and Kashmir, an act with no basis in law. The Army also has significant passive interception capabilities along the Line of Control (LoC) — which also pick up civilian communication.
• India's National Technical Research Organisation (NTRO) has also deployed computers fitted at key internet hubs — the junction boxes, as it were, through which all of the country's internet traffic must pass.
• National Technical Research Organisation
• The risks of this proliferation of technology have become evident over the last two years. In Punjab, one of four passive interception units is reported to be missing, feared to have been lost to a political party or corporate institution. Andhra Pradesh actually shut down its passive interception capabilities after it accidentally intercepted sensitive conversations between high officials. Karnataka officials also accidentally intercepted conversations involving a romantic relationship between a leading politician and a movie star — while Mumbai has had several scandals involving unauthorised listening-in to phones owned by corporate figures and movie stars.
• Police do require warrants to tap individual phones
• In one notorious case, the politician Amar Singh's phone conversations were recorded with the consent of his service provider on the basis of what turned out to be a faked government e-mail. Mr. Singh's personal life became a subject of public discussion, but no one has yet been held accountable for the outrageously unlawful intrusion into his privacy.
• “When an officer on a salary of Rs.8,000 a month has pretty much unrestricted access to this kind of technology,” a senior Maharashtra Police officer admitted, “things will go wrong, and have gone wrong.”
• Earlier this year, Congress spokesperson and Member of Parliament, Manish Tewari, introduced a private member's bill that would enable Parliamentary oversight over the intelligence services — the worldwide pattern in democracies.
• India is set to make ever-larger investments in these technologies, making the case for oversight ever more urgent.
• In 2014, the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO), aided by the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), is scheduled to launch India's first dedicated spy satellite, the Rs.100-crore communications intelligence satellite, tentatively named CCISat.
• Like similar systems operated by the United States, Russia, and Japan, among others, CCISat will suck up gigabites of electronic information from its orbital position 500 kilometres above the earth, passing it on to military supercomputers that will scan it for information of military and intelligence value.
• This may be money well spent: there can be little doubt that communication intelligence has contributed significantly to defending India. However, the failure to regulate the technology will have far-reaching consequences for our democracy — and could even mean its subversion.

Private Member’s Bill

• A private member’s bill is introduced by an individual member of the legislative, as opposed to a party. He/She may belong to the party in power or the Opposition.
• When the bill is tabled in the house, by convention, the motion is not opposed. There have been exceptions, however.
• A member cannot introduce more than four bills during a session. And while a bill is pending, a similar bill cannot be admitted.
• Generally most private bills don’t even reach the discussion stage.
• Till date, Parliament has passed 14 Private Members’ Bills. 

  • In 2011, THE INTELLIGENCE SERVICES (POWERS AND REGULATION) BILL, 2011 was introduced as a privet bill to regulate the manner of the functioning and exercise of powers of Indian Intelligence Agencies within and beyond the territory of India and to provide for the coordination, control and oversight of such agencies.

Technology Experiment Satellite

• Technology Experiment Satellite or (TES) is an experimental satellite to demonstrate and validate, in orbit, technologies that could be used in the future satellites of Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO).
• The technologies demonstrated in TES are attitude and orbit control system, high torque reaction wheels, new reaction control system with optimized thrusters and a single propellant tank, light weight spacecraft structure, solid state recorder, X-band phased array antenna, improved satellite positioning system, miniaturized TTC and power system and, two-mirror-on-axis camera optics.
• It is used for remote sensing of civilian areas, mapping industry and geographical information services.
• The launch of TES made India the second country in the world after the United States that can commercially offer images with one meter resolution.
• TES, which was launched in 2001, helped the US army with high-resolution images during the 9/11 counter against the Taliban.

The US Case:

• In the U.S., telecommunications carriers are required   by law to cooperate in the interception of communications for law enforcement purposes under the terms of Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA).
• A well-designed tap installed on a phone wire can be difficult to detect. In some   instances some law enforcement maybe able to even access a mobile phone's internal microphone even while it isn't actively being used on a phone call (unless the battery   is removed).
• These data can be accessed by security services, often with   fewer legal restrictions than for a tap. This information used to be collected using special equipment known as pen registers and trap and trace devices and U.S. law   still refers to it under those names.