Tips for a tap

Sunlight at last

The breakthrough came in August 1996, when thanks to a public interest litigation filed by the People8217;s Union for Civil Liberties, the Supreme Court laid down strict guidelines for guarding the privacy of citizens.

The judgement laid down these among the important provisos for telephonic surveillance. One, every interception order had to be signed by the home secretary at the Centre or in the state. Two, the interception would be allowed for brief periods and for a maximum of six months. Three, that a high-level review committee would examine the results of each and every interception before permitting an extension.

The guidelines did not come a day too early, for with the introduction of cellular services in 1995, criminals quickly slipped into the mobile communication mode. At one point, there was a panic among law enforcement agencies as officials realised their leads were turning cold and it became apparent that the hitherto zealously-guarded sarkari tapping operations would have to move to the private sector.

After several rounds of confabulations it was decided that the licence agreement signed by the service providers and the department of telecommunication DoT would have a clause as a result of which operators would be obliged to provide dedicated surveillance lines to identified government agencies, such as the Intelligence Bureau and the CBI.

And while there was no mention of who8217;d pay the bill for setting up the surveillance shop, the operators ended up footing it.

Thus, the current situation is that the

1996 SC guidelines are meant to be followed by both landline and cellular phone operators and private operators have no option but to allow access to their switchboard and allow a wiretap 8212; once they receive written authorisation.

And cases were cracked

By all accounts, the setting up of the country-wide surveillance network had huge spin-off benefits. Several conspiracies 8212; including the attack on Parliament House, the hijack of IC-814 and the Hansie Cronje match-fixing case 8212; unspooled thanks to the wiretaps. Among other crimes cracked via the telephone tapping route were the Shivani Bhatnagar murder case, the DDA scam, the arrest of Romesh Sharma and of Bharat Shah.

And how useful as a body of evidence wiretaps could be was proven, for instance, in the Telgi fake stamp case, when investigators landed transcripts of some 1,300 conversations, stretching into 100 hours of conversations.

Interestingly, while the Delhi Police is on the backfoot today saying that the 8216;8216;authorisation8217;8217; for tapping Amar Singh was done on the basis of forged documents, it is the only agency to have admitted that there was rampant misuse. In June 2002, when he was special commissioner, K.K. Paul sent a secret communication to senior officials in which he admitted that junior police officers were conniving with members of the public and misusing the system.

Paul had complained: 8220;In certain cases printouts have been unauthorisedly obtained of members of the public by their opponents in trade or by estranged spouses with the connivance of the local police.8221; He also admitted in the latter that sometimes phone companies extended tapping facilities with the assurance that the authorisation would come later but that 8220;sometimes it the authorisation letter is not given even the next day and sometimes never at all8221;.

Paul8217;s admission and the current allegations of a private telephone company allowing a wiretap without checking the antecedents of the targeted number or the authenticity of the authorisation have again exposed the lacunae in what the SC intended to be an infallible system with several checks and balances.

Big brothers everywhere

There is yet another disturbing dimension to the phone tapping imbroglio. There are reports of phone interception now having gone into the 8216;8216;passive8217;8217; mode with some private companies selling passive GSM monitoring systems to intercept telephone calls.

A few months ago, when the Reliance feud was at its peak, one branch of the Ambani family had alleged their calls were tapped by GSM monitoring. The National Security Council is known to have probed at least one private company selling GSM monitoring systems and siphoning off the equipment to private parties.

Obviously, with new technologies coming in and with vested interests willing to pay big bucks for getting their opponents tapped, a fresh review of the safeguards in the surveillance system is needed.