Govt acts tough on telecom operators over monitoring of calls

Acting tough on telecom operators for not providing enough facilities to security agencies for monitoring suspicious telephone calls, the government has asked the telecom department to amend licensing agreement with service providers to enhance capacity meant for agencies.

The issue came up during the Commonwealth Games last month when the telecom operators refused to provide access to security agencies for monitoring of suspicious telephone numbers citing limited capacity of the system, official sources said.

This prompted the security agencies to raise the issue at the highest level prompting home secretary GK Pillai to convene a meeting with telecom operators last month which was attended by the officials from the department of telecommunication as well, the sources said.

A paper circulated by the telecom department states, "It is recommended that the provisions for capability to concurrently handle at least 1% of the installed capacity for Legal Interception (LI) functions and LI capabilities and provisioning at least 5% of the installed capacity may be incorporated in the Telecommunication Engineering Centres (TEC) besides required amendment in the licensing conditions."

The move was initiated after the present level of simultaneous monitoring of calls and total number of targets that can be provisioned for monitoring were proving to be a major bottleneck for operations by security agencies, the sources said.

The security agencies had informed the government that a large number of call drops had been noticed and some of the service providers refused to entertain request of monitoring of certain numbers on the pretext of limitation of capacity, the sources said.

The home ministry asked the telecom department to issue necessary instructions to service providers to address the shortcomings to the satisfaction of the law enforcement agencies.