[Reader-list] India : The Business of Phone Taps...

[Harsh Kapoor]

The Hindu
Sunday, Jan 26, 2003
Opinion - News Analysis  
 
Time to ring in changes

Incidents of invasion of privacy and complaints from customers about 
the service point to the need for a debate on the working of private 
telephone companies, writes Sandeep Dikshit.

AS PRIVATISATION gathers momentum in the telecom sector, there are 
growing doubts over several key issues relating to the rights of 
consumers.

Despite assertions by successive Governments regarding introduction 
of new age legislation and the setting up of an organisation to 
referee over telecom companies, we do not appear to have travelled 
very far towards ensuring privacy and a fair deal for telecom 
subscribers.

Recent incidents of invasion of privacy and numerous complaints from 
subscribers about the service point to the need for a debate on the 
working of private phone companies. Rarely addressed by political 
parties and civil society, the two subjects have to be brought into 
the public domain as soon as possible for restitution. As more and 
more people turn to higher technology-based phones of all varieties 
due to falling rates, privacy and grievance redress will become more 
and more contentious.

Grievance redress, especially when more and more individuals opt for 
corporate-operated phone services, is a major issue. But more emotive 
is the right to privacy. There is no definite indication that privacy 
is being respected as per the Supreme Court's guidelines issued in 
1996. As India's cream shifts to cellular phones as the preferred 
mode of communication, more and more instances come to light of not 
just security agencies but even cellular company employees selling 
telephone records of rival companies for a consideration or just 
listening in on conversations.

In one celebrated case, that is still talked about in hushed tones 
because of the people involved, a top notch political fixer persuaded 
his friend, who owned a cellular company, to furnish him with 
transcripts of the conversations his female acquaintance had with a 
top IT company executive. The woman came to know of the snooping and 
it required the combined efforts of several worthies to douse the 
fires.

Reliable sources also affirm that the recent attempt to overthrow the 
BSP-BJP coalition Government in Uttar Pradesh was incapacitated 
because of `informal' cell phone tapping. The phone records of a 
hotelier-turned-politician, who was among those financing the rebels, 
were turned over to politicians interested in keeping Mayawati in 
power. From then on it was not too difficult to choke the flow of 
funds.





In due course, the scandal and the revolt were forgotten. But there 
have been occasions when the issue of privacy while using cellular 
phones has threatened to burst into the public domain. The first 
time, when the late South African cricket captain, Hansie Cronje's 
cellular phone was tapped and later when a cellular phone company 
allegedly gave the police cell phone records of a person who claimed 
that the Delhi police had in cold blood gunned down two unarmed 
persons in the basement of Ansal Plaza. On the basis of the records 
of the cell phone which also gave away its carrier's movements, the 
police claimed that the alleged eyewitness was not at the site of the 
encounter with the alleged Lashkar-e-Taiba terrorists.

On both occasions, statist and right-wing mentality prevailed over 
the voices of dissent raised by civil rights activists. Since the 
police were proved right in the Cronje case, the merit of tapping the 
phone was not investigated further. In the shoot-out case too, 
perhaps the whistle-blower could not stand the might of the state. He 
did serve notice to the cellular company accusing it of breaching his 
right to privacy but little was heard after that. Had the person 
persisted with his query - "under what authority of law has your 
company divulged the private information and details of the mobile 
phone?" - who knows, the lid may have been blown of a shadowy 
practice that appears to be increasingly used by some companies.

Against these examples, security agencies can cite several instances 
to prove that tapping of cellular phones has yielded rich dividends 
in the form of nabbing elusive criminals. But that is hardly of 
comfort to citizens who suspect that their right to privacy may be 
getting violated, not just in the national interest but by other 
vested interests. To set the record straight, many companies have 
carried forward their culture of corporate uprightness to cellular 
operations as well. But there are several others who, to put it 
mildly, would never qualify for a corporate uprightness award. And it 
is they who are cause for concern because India's cream relies 
predominantly on mobile phones for honing business strategies, 
striking political alliances or simply indulging in intimate 
conversation.

The need to bring the issue under the public spotlight has become 
more pressing because global trends show that fixed-line phones will 
be replaced in urban areas by mobile phones and India may be no 
exception to the trend. But being privately owned, cell companies are 
more vulnerable to the dictates of security agencies which have 
extracted 180 lines from each of them for tapping.

The Supreme Court, while upholding tapping, had set out the 
guidelines in 1996 when cell phones were just making their 
appearance. With more subscribers forecast to graduate to cell 
phones, this would be an appropriate time to not only bring new 
technology into the ambit of judicial guidelines but also examine 
whether previous ones were effective.

According to Rajeev Dhavan, lawyer, "the system of review set up by 
the Supreme Court enabling those who authorise taps to review their 
own orders with a conclave of colleagues is arbitrary, secretive, 
shabby and an insult to the protection of privacy and civil 
liberties. There was a time when many who rule the country today were 
convinced that India's apparatus of phone tapping was invidious. But 
now they are in-charge of this form of state surveillance."

As compared to fixed phones, tapping of cellular phones can lead to 
greater invasion of privacy. Cellular phone company computers can 
record millions of movements going back to more than a year and 
therefore the location of a user at any given time or date can be 
traced to within a few hundred meters of the exact spot. Security 
agencies are understood to be actively making what are called 
"plotter's charts" in their terminology. The cell phone of a person 
visiting the national capital can be locked in their beams by sleuths 
and even if he does not discuss confidential issues, the signals can 
track his movements.

National security was an overriding concern that forced previous 
victims of phone tapping including Atal Behari Vajpayee and Lal 
Krishna Advani to go slow on installing safety mechanisms when they 
took over the reins of the Government. However, sophistication in 
tapping will ensure that in spite of procedures to protect the 
average citizen from indiscriminate tapping, intelligence agencies 
can carry on with tapping that would help them avert threats from 
anti-national elements. For instance, the Research and Analysis Wing 
(RAW) is known to possess computers that can catch a key word in a 
conversation and then record the entire conversation. The computer is 
fed with the name of the wanted person and any conversation where 
that person's name is used will be recorded.

The Supreme Court in its 1996 review did not suggest periodic reviews 
or independent panels that could look into the malaise of 
indiscriminate tapping. With tens of thousands of circuits having 
already been allocated to intelligence agencies, and more to be 
provided by new phone companies entering the market, this could be 
the right time to prevent India from becoming an eavesdroppers' 
paradise. The review must also ensure that owners and employees of 
cellular companies are denied the pleasure of delving in their 
backyards for details of persons called by a particular subscriber. 
There is an urgent need to shore up public confidence by prescribing 
guidelines because several of the entrants are known to have taken 
questionable short-cuts on their way to becoming mega corporations.

As is the case with tapping, the issue of a satisfactory subscriber 
grievance redress machinery has also not been the subject of public 
discourse. Even trenchant critics of liberalisation of telecom 
services and parliamentary committees have not applied themselves to 
suggesting a suitable framework.

Though state-run companies have earned the reputation of being 
sluggish, the years of liberalisation have seen a remarkable 
improvement in their complaints machinery. The Mahanagar Telephone 
Nigam Limited and, to a lesser extent, the Bharat Sanchar Nigam 
Limited have used computerisation to ensure that the fault reporting 
system became more streamlined. Even otherwise, the complaints 
mechanism of these companies has matured over time and is much 
broader since the two companies are answerable to Parliament. But 
that is not the case with private firms. The increase in complaints 
against billing is directly proportionate to the rise in the customer 
base. A little while ago, consumers were bewildered by the large 
number of tariff packages offered by the companies but that was set 
right by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI). However, 
consumers still complain about unexplained charges for roaming.

The TRAI and greater competition do keep the companies alert. 
However, grievance redress panels on a countrywide basis are 
required. Instead of opting for bureaucrats and judicial authorities, 
easily accessible consumer forums are required. The entry of new 
companies should serve to accelerate the thought process in this 
regard because many of them have asked subscribers to pay with 
post-dated cheques. As a result there are bound to be more disputes.

The TRAI has covered some ground in this matter. Due to budgetary 
constraints it has largely opted for indirect monitoring of broad 
customer satisfaction criteria such as network performance from the 
point of view of call success rate, service access delays, call drop 
rate and percentage of connections with good voice quality. It is 
expected that periodic rating of companies on the basis of this 
criteria will force them to provide efficient service.

The TRAI itself admits that this is not a complete exercise since the 
vital component of customer feedback is missing. It has proposed 
empanelling independent agencies that could carry out surveys of 
customers of each company. But even this is incomplete since 
individual subscribers are left unattended. Due to extra costs 
involved, private companies are bound to resist setting up easily 
accessible complaints cells on the lines of those being run by BSNL 
and MTNL all over the country. A public debate on enabling a 
subscriber with even the smallest compliant to get a hearing is of 
vital importance.

A common refrain is of existing help line numbers of cellular 
companies turning hostile when subscribers report unexplained 
debiting from cash cards or seek urgent refund of security deposits. 
The TRAI has addressed itself to this aspect also. It has prescribed 
strict billing complaint resolution norms such as asking cell 
companies to resolve 99 per cent of all complaints within four weeks 
and cent per cent within a year. The billing complaints too must be 
less than 2 per 1,000 bills issued. But as is the case with network 
management criteria, the TRAI would have to process a mass of data to 
arrive at national or operator-specific figures. The individual 
subscriber has been left in the cold. There is an urgent need to 
correct this situation especially when there are one crore cellular 
subscribers already and, if experts are to be believed, the number 
will double by next year.