Intelligence Bureau seeks ‘unlimited’ mobile snooping
Call for concern
IB also wants operators to provide location-based services.
Asks DoT to decide quickly on Chinese vendors.
Plea for VoIP-based callers to be tracked.
Thomas K Thomas
New Delhi, Sept. 15 The Intelligence Bureau has told the Department of
Telecom that it wants telecom rules amended to enable it to monitor
all mobile calls without any restrictions.
Under the existing universal access licence norms, operators are
required to randomly pick only about 210 simultaneous calls at any
given time for monitoring by the security agencies.
However, given the security concerns in the country, the IB wants
operators to make provisions to allow the security agencies to snoop
into as many calls as they want to.
The IB has told DoT that there are seven authorised agencies for
monitoring cellular traffic and with only 210 calls being made
available, each agency is able to track only 30 calls at any time.
“The requirement of security agencies such as the IB has gone up
manifold, requiring simultaneous interception of minimum 100 calls or
more. Therefore, amendments to the licence agreement may be made to
remove this clause and stipulate for providing the capability to
monitor any number of simultaneous calls as made at any time without
any limitation,” a senior DoT official said.
Other points of concern
The IB has also told the DoT to mandate operators to implement
location-based services, which will enable the security agencies
pinpoint the exact location of any specific user.
It has raised concerns about Chinese vendors, especially BSNL buying
equipment from Huawei despite objections by security agencies. “There
is little or no capability to test and certify the telecom elements
such as routers and switches, from a security point of view before
deployment. Despite objections by the IB, Huawei is supplying mobile
equipment to BSNL. This poses a serious threat to telecom security in
terms of denial of service and eavesdropping,” said an internal note.
Security agencies have asked the DoT to stop Voice over Internet
Protocol (VoIP)-based calls as there is no capability to trace the
actual callers. Most VoIP calls do not transmit caller line
identification and this makes it impossible to track the caller. “As
the DoT had conveyed that it is not possible to mandate transmission
of CLI from abroad, we had approached the DoT to block such calls till
a technical solution is found,” said the note.
The IB has asked the DoT to review its views on asking BSNL to share
call data records (CDR). Both BSNL and the DoT had earlier told the IB
that sharing CDR was not provided for under the Indian Telegraph Act.
Related Stories:
Security concerns over BSNL’s 3G network
IMEI number: DoT insists on compliance
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