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Journalism of Courage
On the night of December 4, 2023, for the one hour between 8.34 pm and 9.34 pm, CCTV cameras at Telangana’s premier intelligence organisation, the Special Intelligence Branch (SIB), were allegedly turned off, a probe by Hyderabad police has revealed.
During this time, 62 hard disks were allegedly destroyed — cut, ground to bits and thrown into a river — in an anteroom at the Hyderabad office, investigators probing the Telangana illegal surveillance case have told The Indian Express.
As reported by The Indian Express, the state police is currently probing allegations that five top police and intelligence officers and a TV channel operator indulged in illegal surveillance of 600 individuals — using the state’s anti-Naxal surveillance mechanisms — to benefit the BRS.
Those allegedly snooped on included politicians, party workers, bureaucrats, businessmen, a sitting High Court judge, as well as their spouses, drivers and even childhood friends, it is learnt.
On Friday, Union Minister of State for Home Affairs and BJP leader Bandi Sanjay Kumar, who is allegedly among those surveilled, deposed before Hyderabad police in connection with the case. After the deposition, he claimed that the phones of 6,500 people were tapped. “Along with me, phones of Revanth Reddy and BRS MLAs were also tapped,” he said. The Indian Express had reported on Friday how an entire module was allegedly dedicated to surveil Revanth and his circle.
According to investigators, the order to destroy the hard disks was allegedly given by the then SIB chief T Prabhakar Rao, who resigned from his post on December 4, 2023, a day after the Congress came to power in the state, replacing the BRS. His plea in the Supreme Court, however, states that the decision was ratified by a review committee of the state’s Chief Secretary, the Secretary of the General Administration Department, and the Law Secretary on December 2, 2023. The then Chief Secretary and Home Secretary did not respond to queries about the case.
While the majority of the disks that were destroyed allegedly contained “political intelligence” or profiles, telephone conversations and online chats of several political leaders, some also contained legitimate surveillance data on the CPI (Maoist), which the SIB was supposed to collect, investigators said. They explained that the SIB, which was founded in 1990 to gather intelligence to thwart the Naxal menace, veered from its stated objective and allegedly started collecting intelligence to benefit the BRS.
According to investigators, apart from the disks with the illegally collected data, the accused allegedly destroyed “invaluable data built by SIB over decades”, which “put the internal security of the nation at risk”.
Thirty-six of the disks were in the possession of a Special Operations Team (SOT), which operated under the SIB, investigators said. Constituted in 2020, it was this team that allegedly gathered political intelligence, investigators say.
According to investigators, the SOT’s lead officer was D Praneeth Kumar alias Praneeth Rao, a DSP of SIB, who was arrested in connection with the case and is now out on bail. Kumar allegedly had three rooms in the SIB office to himself and 11 personnel under him. They had access to 17 desktop computers, two laptops, two phone numbers and a dedicated leased line with internet connection.
According to investigators, the SOT would allegedly write to various telecom service providers to allow them to intercept calls. This activity, called legal interception, was allegedly signed off by Prabhakar Rao, investigators familiar with the chargesheet said.
A policeman formerly posted with the SIB, who is now a witness in the case, is learnt to have told the police that he was “forced to add phone numbers unrelated to Left Wing Extremism to the list of those being intercepted”.
As per the provisions of the Indian Telegraph Rules and standard operating procedures, every six months, legal interception data has to be destroyed. However, the witness is learnt to have told the Hyderabad police that the destruction was ordered hurriedly in December, one month before it was scheduled to be destroyed. Besides, there was no need to turn off the CCTV cameras at the time of destruction of legal intelligence, he is learnt to have told the police.
The witness is learnt to have told the police that “no other person was allowed into the SOT rooms even when technical repairs were required for the systems”. The technicians, he told police, had to collect the systems from the doorstep of the SOT rooms.
Further, the SOT allegedly took the support of a private surveillance operator based in Hyderabad to track the internet activities of targets, investigators said.
The police case relies on four witnesses from this private lab, which provides technical assistance for intercepting online conversations, including on WhatsApp. “They are consultants for various law enforcement and defence agencies in India providing services of software developments, telecommunication services and cyber security services,” said an investigator familiar with the chargesheet.
This company, according to investigators, provided three software tools which could “gather data from various social media platforms like X, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Snapchat, etc.” The tools also helped in “decrypting PCAP data and reading messages sent through applications like WhatsApp in targeted cellphones”.
