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Intelligence agencies, responsible for the security of the country, want to keep a tab on your activities on social networking sites such as Facebook and Orkut.
The Intelligence Bureau has asked the Department of Telecom to ensure that telecom operators put in place monitoring systems that would allow them to snoop into real time updates by users on social networking sites.
“Telecom service providers currently do not have adequate lawful interception facilities for full reconstruction of Web intercepts for various Web sites using Web 2.0 technology like Facebook, Twitter, Youtube and Picasa. The quality of reconstruction of captured data is also not good. The DoT is requested to instruct all the telecom service providers to upgrade their monitoring systems to handle Web 2.0 traffic,” an internal note from Ministry of Home Affairs stated.
But telecom operators claim that they also do not have access to these Web sites.
“These are independent services offered by different companies operating from outside the country. Similar requests were earlier made by IB for BlackBerry and Gmail. There is no way for us to put in place monitoring systems for third party services,” said an industry representative.
The security agencies have been insisting on getting real time access to all services offered on telecom networks. The IB had recently told telecom operators to keep records of all calls and data transmitted through their network for a period of five years. They had also expressed concerns about 3G video calls and instant messaging services offered by the likes of Google and BlackBerry.
Senior DoT officials said that the MHA's latest request is being looked into from the licensing point of view. The DoT's problem is that it cannot directly ask application service providers to offer interception as they do not come under the purview of Indian laws. Therefore the only option is to ask telecom companies but they are not prepared to bear the costs associated.
The DoT had earlier suggested that the security agencies should upgrade their capabilities to snoop into telecom networks instead of asking service providers to offer monitoring facilities. The basic problem is that under Indian laws, operators are allowed to use encryption up to 40 bit whereas most of the data services use much higher encryption to make it more secure against hacking.
Security agencies do not have the technology to crack into anything that has higher encryption keys. The Government had earlier appointed a committee to look into the issue of intercepting and monitoring data transmitted through highly encrypted systems.
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