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India’s surveillance project may be as lethal as PRISM Central Monitoring System covers all calls, SMSs, emails, web browsing, videoconferencing, multi-media streaming and even video games

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.
The Hindu
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NOT IN OUR BEST INTEREST

Imagine a device following you every minute of every day, listening into your telephone calls, reading your emails, intercepting your text messages, shredding any privacy you may have in life. Sounds too Orwellian to you? Well, sometimes truth is stranger than fiction. Brace yourselves, for the future is now. Thanks to the Indian Central Monitoring System (ICMS) we can all look forward to voyeuristic officials of our so-called “intelligence” agencies being privy to any form of correspondence we may engage in with our loved and unloved ones. So what exactly will the ICMS do? Since April, all communication over telephone or the internet is being monitored and analysed by the government. This surveillance system is second only to the recently discovered PRISM in the United States. And if you thought PRISM was bad, at least subsequent reports showed that it had a red-tape bureaucratic mechanism which the US authorities had to get approval from before spying on their people. The Indian government, ever mindful of the pain of red-tapism in India, has done away with it for the CMS. This literally raises the question of “Who will watch the watchers?” According to the Indian government, the watchers will be watching themselves. The questions that need answers are: What are the safeguards that ensure the CSM people don’t misuse their prying powers? Why is there no law protecting the privacy of the netizens of India? What prevents the abuse of the system by interested parties such as politicians? What came first, the chicken or the egg? Another even more worrying question is: why has the Indian media relegated this story to the back pages? As regular purveyors of the media may have realised, the mainstream media seems to be more focused on the news that really matters. Come on guys, we know you have to grab the latest exclusive about SRK hugging Salman, but some pretense of reporting on what really effects Indians would be nice. Surely matters of invasion of our fundamental rights registers slightly on your radar? As reported in Medianama, Milind Deora, Minister of State for Information Technology, one of the few to speak on the CMS, said that “the CMS is being set up to safeguard our privacy from mobile operators,and protects the national security of the country. The officer in charge will not have access to information, politicians will not get access”. Which doesn’t make much sense. But since the media seems to not be too interested in asking the questions which need to be asked, the government can get away with saying anything about the CMS. That’s when they deign to speak about it, of course. Their policy seems to be – ask me no questions and we’ll tell you no lies. A policy which the media seems to be quite happy to pay heed to. After all, other than for Shalini Singh of the Hindu, no other media house seems to have written an in-depth story on the CMS. “As a citizen I understand that we must do what we need to do to protect ourselves and such systems are primarily designed to protect the interests of the country. But if the recent past is any indication, the scope for misuse and the impact of such misuse will be, I fear, far more damaging in the long-term than anything this system hopes to prevent”, writes Siddharth Bhansali, founder of the online petition to stop the CMS. If we go by what Deora is saying and believe that the government has our security at heart, it still doesn’t mean it should occur at the expense of our privacy. Violence (of which terrorism is itself an extremely small sub-set) doesn’t even feature in the top 30 causes of death in India. Suicide is one of the top 10 causes of death in India. Does that mean that the government should criminally prosecute people who try to commit suicide to deter them from committing suicide? Oh, wait… Doing a second-rate impression of an authoritarian government in a dystopian future is not the way to go about reducing terrorism in India. How about improving the facilitation of information between intelligence agencies? How about following through on your pre-emptive terrorist strike warnings? How about reducing the instance of politicians using intelligence agencies for their own political purposes? How about adequately funding and training covert ops? These may not be difficult to implement, provided everyone with the power and political will sit down and try to work out non-intrusive ways of doing so. Cooperation you say? Who believes in such archaic concepts? Well I’d like to think that certain concepts are universal and can be present even in the meanest and mindless of beings, even if they may be politicians.
Newslaundry
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India goes big brother way, increases surveillance The national Cyber Security Policy allows better surveillance on Indians, but is silent on how sensitive information will be insulated from hackers.

As the world follows the fast-paced, globe-trotting adventures of American whistleblower Edward Snowden, who exposed illegal data phishing activities orchestrated by America's National Security Agency (NSA), India unveiled its national Cyber Security Policy (CSP) in New Delhi. Telecommunications and IT Minister Kapil Sibal, while introducing the new policy, said that implementing this new tool would be a challenge to begin with. "This policy is a framework document and it gives you a broad outline of our vision. The real task or the challenge is the operationalisation of this policy," said Sibal. On the heels of Sibal's comments, other ministers such as External Affairs Minister Salman Khurshid, who is dealing with the revelations of NSA spying on Indian establishments, tried to pass on the issue by saying the US was involved in "cyber scrutiny," and not "cyber snooping". The framework of the new cyber policy looks to specifically safeguard vital national infrastructure such as defence systems, research organisations, power infrastructure, nuclear facilities and so on. However, the "broad outline" presented to the public reportedly has gaping loopholes on how these objectives will actually be achieved. India took its first major stride into the world of cyber snooping with the setting up of the Central Monitoring System (CMS). Devised in 2011, CMS operates under the eyes of the Intelligence Bureau. All communication that Indians do via the internet, phone, SMS and so on is going to be centrally monitored even as India continues to lag behind in creating privacy laws for its citizens against such a "totalitarian" style of surveillance. Although like many other similar spying tools, CMS will not be able to break strongly-encrypted communications. It will also not be able to access communications originating from beyond the Indian borders. Meanwhile, CMS, according to some lawyers, is considered illegal under current judicial frameworks. "The advantage CMS has is that India does not have sufficient privacy laws protecting its citizens. The bizarre thing is that instead of rectifying this loophole, the government seems to be willing to take advantage of it," explains a Delhi-based lawyer familiar with the matter but who did not wish to be identified. Other Indian agencies such as the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), which comes under the Special Police Establishment Act, are also touted to get interception abilities under the CMS. India has already seen arrests of internet users for posting criticism of the government or decisions the government has taken. The most popular case is that of student Shaheen Dhada from Palghar, who was arrested for writing against the closure of Mumbai following the death of Shiv Sena leader Bal Thackeray. Dhadha wrote about this on her Facebook page and was subsequently arrested. Other such incidents have not been uncommon since. Following the CMS and the CSP, India is also looking to launch the National Cyber Coordination Centre (NCCC) later this year. The NCCC is expected to create real-time working assessments on cyber security threats, which will be able to put into operational action within a short period of the threat assessment being released. Developed at a reported cost of over Rs 1,000 crore, the NCCC is expected to involve all the internet service providers. However, questions still remain within the public sphere on the use of such agencies and how the sanctity of private data of users will remain uncompromised. These concerns have been amplified since India failed to detect mass data phishing by the US. According to a recent report, more than 6 billion pieces of data from India may have been compromised by US agencies. "The NISP (cyber policy) is silent on privacy issue. The links with various existing laws in place should be drawn out explicitly. There is no mention of abuse/misuse of power from information gathered for national security purposes by government officials/agencies. NISP must make clear and make an unambiguous policy statement as to how such cases should be treated. This will help preventing human rights violations as well as corruption," says a note of observations released by the Internet and Mobile Association of India (IMAI). Indian ministries and agencies have been lax on the issue of protecting data from the ever increasing threat for cyber warfare. The level of training given to government employees, specifically in sensitive agencies such as defence, foreign affairs, home affairs and so on has also come into the spotlight. Government employees today are not necessarily aware of the modern day information technology espionage threats, let alone techniques and knowledge to defend against such intrusions. Along with new agencies, an education programme from the ground level up of governance may also be required. "We once sat down to check Delhi's internet backbone. We found thousands of systems compromised. All were government's systems. Research and Analysis Wing, Intelligence Bureau, Military Intelligence... we don't realise how much damage has already happened," a cyber-security analyst was quoted as saying to a national monthly magazine last year. A challenge for India to secure its administrative and government agencies is to cultivate a culture of information security in a largely technologically backward work force in this aspect. Agencies such as the National Technical Research Organisation, Defence Research and Development Organisation and others have been targeted by hackers frequently. And in the past, warnings by these very agencies to their respective offices in the higher chain of command have reportedly gone unheeded until major losses of data had taken place. Many countries around the world are launching such agencies as the digital age becomes a new, effective and common arena of espionage, threatening national interests and vital installations. The "big brother" appearance of the government's role swelling to protect virtual interests at a quick pace will, in all likeliness, see further compromises on personal privacy of the Indian citizens until the legal framework catches up with the modern day digital protection needs of the country.
http://www.sunday-guardian.com/investigation/india-goes-big-brother-way-increases-surveillance
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