Milind Deora, a former minister in the United Progressive Alliance government, has cautioned against the possible misuse of a new and more sophisticated system of surveillance conceptualised by his government and now reportedly put on the fast track by the Narendra Modi government. Called the Central Monitoring System, it allows government agencies to bypass phone and internet service providers to directly intercept communications. In an interview to Scroll.in, Deora said that he realised the system could lead to “technically lawful but malicious” interception in the absence of a privacy law.
Currently, in India, the sanction of the union home secretary is required before an agency can tap phones or intercept communications. According to an official reply under a query under the Right to Information Act, the home secretary clears nearly 300 phone tap applications every day. This information led to a seminal study by the New Delhi-based Software Freedom Law Centre which found there was very little transparency about what the government is doing with so much of data that it collects through these 100,000 phone taps every year.
Ideally, any phone tap can lead to only one of two results. It can ether lead to conclusively establish that the person whose communications are being intercepted is guilty, as was suspected. Or, it can reveal that the suspicions were not founded and the person is not indulging in any criminal activity.
If the interception shows that the person is indeed guilty as suspected, then the person should be charged under the relevant laws and prosecuted in the courts. If the person is proved to be innocent after the lawful interception has been conducted, there is no guarantee that the material collected during the period when their phones were being tapped has been destroyed. None of the 10 authorised agencies under law has published a transparency report and even when asked for metadata about whether the law is being followed, they have withheld information.”