Private hand in phone tapping worries Manmohan Singh; probe ordered

Prime minister (PM) Manmohan Singh on Tuesday cautioned government authorities to exercise their powers to tap phone lines with utmost care and stay within the ambit of well-defined rules.

The PM assured that he would ask cabinet secretary KM Chandrasekhar to look into the phone tapping issue, including the procedures followed, and give a report to the cabinet within a month. But his directive to Chandrasekhar is aimed more at preventing tapping of telephones by private agencies rather than by the institutional framework of the government, it is learnt.

The PM is understood to be worried about a confidential report submitted by the National Technical Research Organisation (NTRO), which talks about off-the-air GSM/CDMA monitoring devices that are freely available to private hands in the country.

The device can record the conversations of a person within the range of 2 kilometres; all one has to do is to feed in the particular mobile number.

The Off-The-Air-Monitoring System machines have been procured by many security and intelligence agencies from foreign suppliers over five years. But these suppliers, from countries like Israel, Ukraine and Russia, have also made them available to private persons.    

A scrutiny of records reveals that the import of these machines is legal and, until recently, came under the Open General Licence (OGL). The customs authorities could not do anything in this regard because these devices were imported in the name of Critical Information Infrastructure Protection (CIIP) purposes.

Even the Indian Telegraph Act does not make a mention of Off-The-Air tapping, despite the existence of 650 million mobile phones.
The confidential note also points out that there are 21 vendors in Delhi, Gurgaon, Noida and Secundarabad, which include six government agencies, selling these machines.

These machines were first introduced in the NTRO, a top government technical surveillance agency directly under the PM, sometime in 2005. Sources say it was a private company’s top executive who told the government about the existence of such a machine.

A number of instances suggest the availability of these devices with private companies, like the tapping of Samajwadi leader Amar Singh’s phone which raised a hue and cry.

Early this year, there was a controversy over the tapping of phones of Sharad Pawar, Nitish Kumar, Digvijay Singh and Prakash Karat; the government had said it was not done by its agencies and nor was anyone authorised.
Private agencies’ involvement becomes obvious as they enable any agency or person to track, hear and record cellphone conversations at will without approaching the telecom companies or any government officer for permission.