[Reader-list] The government's listening to us

[Subhash]

Not a single phone conversation, SMS, email or any other electronic
communication is private any more. Some stupid guy in the govt. is
listening to our discussions all the time.
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The government's listening to us
Praveen Swami

Ever since 26/11, India has made massive purchases of communications
intelligence equipment from secretive companies from India and abroad.
In the absence of effective legal oversight, it threatens the
democracy it was bought to defend.

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. RAW's equipment had picked
up Pakistan's army chief and later military ruler, Pervez Musharraf,
speaking to his chief of staff, General Muhammad Aziz, from a hotel
room in Beijing. “The entire reason for the success of this
operation,” the RAW officer heard General Aziz saying on May 29, 1999,
“was this total secrecy.” He probably smiled.

For the first time, India had hard evidence that Pakistan's army, not
jihadists, had planned and executed a war that had brought two
nuclear-armed states to the edge of a catastrophic confrontation.
RAW's computers established that the voices were indeed those of
Generals Musharraf and Aziz, pinpointed their locations – and
undermined Pakistan's diplomatic position beyond redemption.

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;
scientists in the Indian Institutes of Technology were tapped, and
quiet efforts to acquire technology worldwide were initiated.

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,
making India one of the largest markets for global vendors.

But this isn't good news: India has no appropriate legal framework to
regulate its vast, and growing, communications intelligence
capabilities. There is almost no real institutional oversight by
political institutions like Parliament — which means there is a clear
and imminent danger that the technology could undermine the very
democracy it was purchased to defend.

Who is selling?

>From a trove of documents obtained by The Hindu, working in
collaboration with WikiLeaks and an international consortium of media
and privacy organisations monitoring the communications intelligence
industry, it is evident Indian companies are already offering
technologies very similar to the most formidable available in the
world.

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. It offers a
range of equipment to monitor satellite, mobile phone, and strategic
military communications.

Shoghi's SCL-3412 satellite communications link monitoring system can,
its literature says, even “passively monitor C and Ku-band satellite
compressed and non-compressed telecom carriers from Intelsat,
Eutelsat, Arabsat, Turksat.” 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, says its products “help communication
service providers, law enforcement, and government agencies worldwide
to counteract the exploitation of today's communication networks,
fight terrorism and organised crime.” 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.

The Hindu telephoned officials at both companies, and then e-mailed
them requesting meetings to discuss issues raised in its
investigation. Neither company responded; one said it was barred from
discussing technical questions with the media by its terms of contract
with its military clients.

Large parts of the most sophisticated equipment, defence sources told
The Hindu, come in from Israel — itself a beneficiary of a special
relationship with the United States. “Israeli vendors often tell us
that they're charging extraordinarily high prices in return for
breaking embargos on sharing these technologies,” one officer said,
“but there's no way of knowing this is the case.”

“If we get what we need,” he said, “we're willing to pay — there's no
point quibbling over a few million dollars.”

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, which allow them to maintain surveillance
not just on phone numbers specified in legally-mandatory warrants from
the Home Secretary, but on all conversations in an area, or region.
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.

Computers at key net hubs

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. Police forces in several States, among them Uttar Pradesh,
Maharashtra, and Andhra Pradesh, have followed suit, with smaller
variants of the same technology.

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.

Intelligence Bureau sources told The Hindu they had been working, for
the past several months, to get States to shut down the 33 passive
interception units in their possession — but with little success. The
pervasive attitude in a federal or quasi-federal polity seems to be:
if the Centre can do it, why can't we?

Police do require warrants to tap individual phones, but in practice
authorisations are handed out with little thought. 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.

Last year, journalist Saikat Datta authored a disturbing exposé,
alleging the NTRO's passive interception capabilities were being
misused for political purposes — and even activities closely
resembling blackmail. Union Home Minister P. Chidambaram denied such
activities were taking place, although he has no supervisory power
over the NTRO — but there has been no investigation.

The fact is that the government has no real interest in rigorous
oversight. The Intelligence Bureau, for example, has long been
summoning call data records for individuals from service providers
with no legal cause, allowing it to maintain a watch on behalf of the
Union Home Ministry of contacts maintained among journalists,
politicians, corporate figures, and government.

In the absence of a full investigation into malpractices, and proper
oversight, there is simply no way of knowing who might, and in what
circumstances, have been targeted through passive interception means —
and that's the whole problem.

“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. “The advancement of communications
interception warrants that a very robust legal architecture to protect
the privacy of individuals needs to be put in place,” he says. “The
intrusive power of the state has to be counter-balanced with the civil
liberties guaranteed by the Constitution.”

In his case, no one seems to have been listening.

Ever-larger investments

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.

>From the public sector giant, Bharat Electronics, India's principal
electronics intelligence manufacturer, we know that CCISat is just a
small part of the country's overall spy technology programme: in
2009-2010, it supplied some Rs.700 crore worth of electronic warfare
equipment, and was scheduled to make deliveries worth Rs.900 crore in
2010-2011. Electronic warfare systems, both offensive and defensive,
were reported to make up over half its order book of Rs.15,000 crore
last year.

Larsen & Toubro, as well as the Tatas' Strategic Electronics Division,
have also expanded their capacities to meet an acquisitions drive that
Indian military officials estimate will cost the country Rs.22,500
crore (about $4.5 billion) before the end of the decade.

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.

http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/article2678501.ece