Access To Knowledge (A2K)

CII Conference on "ACT": Achieve Cyber Security Together"

kovey — 2013-07-26T08:17:40Z

The Confederation of Indian Industries (CII) organized a conference on facing cyber threats and challenges at Hotel Hilton in Chennai on July 13, 2013. Kovey Coles attended this conference and shares a summary of the event in this blog post.

This research was undertaken as part of the 'SAFEGUARDS' project that CIS is undertaking with Privacy International and IDRC

The conference hosted by CII in the Hotel Hilton, was well attended, and featured a range of industry experts, researches and developers, and members of the Indian armed forces.

Participants focused on the importance of Indian entities reaching new, adequate levels of cyber security. It was stated early in the event that India is one of the world's most targeted areas for cyber-attacks, and its number of domestic internet users is known to be rapidly increasing in an age which many view as a new era of international information warfare. Despite this, the speakers considered India to be too far behind other countries in its understanding of cyber security. In the opening remarks, CII Chairman Santhanam implored "We need hard core techies in this field… we are not producing them." Another speaker, Savitha Kesav Jagadeesan, a practicing lawyer in Chennai, asked if India would wait until the "9/11 of cyberspace" occurrence before we establish the same level of precautionary measures online as it exists now in transportation security.

With the presence of both the government’s executive forces and the private industries, the aura circulating the conference room was that of a collective Indian defense, a secure nation only achieved through both secure governmental and industrial aspects. Similar to the previous day’s DSCI cyber security conference, many speakers discussed security issues pertinent to the financial and banking industries, and other cyber crimes which had pecuniary goals. For people seeking to avoid the array of scams and frauds online, some talks shared some of the most basic advice, like safe password practices. "Passwords are like toothbrushes," said A.S. Murthy of the CDAC, "use them often, never share them with anyone, change them often." Other talks went into the intricacies of various hacking schemes, including tab-nabbing and Designated Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks, describing their tactics and how to moderate them.

In the end, the conference had certainly informed the attendees of the goals, and the challenges, that India will face in the coming months and years. The speakers (all of them) showed how the world of cyber security was quickly evolving, and demonstrated the imperative in government and industry entities evolving their own practices and defenses in stride. The ambitions of several presentations matched the well-publicized "5 lakh cyber professionals in 5 years" plan, placing a strong emphasis in the current and future training of young students in cyber security. Ultimately, I think, the conference helped convince that cyber security is neither a futile, nor completely infallible concept. As CISCO Vice President Col. K.P.M. Das said towards the end of the evening, the most ideal form of cyber security is truly "all about trust, the ability to recover, and transparency/visibility."

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/cii-conference-on-act

DSCI Best Practices Meet 2013

kovey — 2013-07-26T08:18:01Z

The DSCI Best Practices Meet 2013 was organized on July 12, 2013 at Hyatt Regency, Anna Salai in Chennai. Kovey Coles attended the meet and shares a summary of the happenings in this blog post.

This research was undertaken as part of the 'SAFEGUARDS' project that CIS is undertaking with Privacy International and IDRC

Last year’s annual Best Practices Meet, sponsored by the Data Security Council of India (DSCI), was held in here in Bangalore, and featured CIS associates as panelists for an agenda focused mostly around mobility in technology. This year, the event was continued in nearby Chennai, where many of India’s top stakeholders in Cyber Security came together at the Hyatt hotel to discuss the modern cyber security landscape. Several of the key points of the day emphasized how the industry realm needed to be especially keen on Cyber Security today. Early speakers explained how many Cyber-Attacks occur as opportunistic attacks on financial institutions, and that these breaches often take months to be discovered, with the discovery usually being made by a third-party. For those reasons, it was repeatedly mentioned throughout the day that modern entities must anticipate attacks as inevitable, and prepare themselves to be able to respond and successfully bounce-back.

Several panelists of the event expanded upon the evolving challenges facing industries, and explained why service based industry continually grows more susceptible to Cyber-Attack. There were representatives from Microsoft, Flextronics, MyEasyDoc, and others, who explained how technological demands of modern consumers resulted inadvertently in weaker security. For example, with customers expecting real-time access to data rather than periodic data reports, i.e financial data reports, industries must now keep their data open, which weakens database security. Overall, the primary challenge faced by the industry was effectively summarized by Microsoft India CSO Ganapathi Subramaniam, stating that within web services, “Security and usability are inversely proportional.” Essentially, the more convenient a product, the less secure its infrastructure.

Despite discussion of the difficulties facing modern producers and consumers, there were undoubtedly highlights of optimism at the conference. A presentation by event sponsor Juniper Networks shed light on practices which combat Cyber-Attackers, including rerouting perceived Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks and finger-printing suspected hackers through a series of characteristics rather than just IP addresses (these characteristics include browser version, fonts, Add-Ons, time zone, and more). Notably, there was a call for cooperation on all fronts in combatting Cyber-crime, for public-private partnerships (PPP), and many citizens stood and spoke on the behalf of civil society’s incorporation in the process as well. One speaker, Retired Brig. Abhimanyu Ghosh admirably tore down sector divisions in the face of Cyber-Security threats, saying “We all want to secure ourselves. It is not a question of industry versus government, government versus industry. Government needs industry, and industry needs government.”

Finally, a few speakers used their opportunity at the conference to highlight issues related to rights and responsibilities of both citizens and government in internet. Nikhil Moro, a scholar at the Hindu Center for Politics and Public Policy, spoke at length about the urgent condition of laws which undermine freedom of speech and freedom of expression in India, especially within while online. His talk, which occurred near the end of the event, stirred the crowd to discussion, and helped remind the attendees of the comprehensiveness of issues which demand attention in the realm of a growing internet presence.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/dsci-bpm-2013-conference-notes

Interview with Mr. Reijo Aarnio - Finnish Data Protection Ombudsman

maria — 2013-07-19T13:02:14Z

Maria Xynou recently interviewed Mr. Reijo Aarnio, the Finnish Data Protection Ombudsman, at the CIS' 5th Privacy Round Table. View this interview and gain an insight on recommendations for better data protection in India!

Mr. Reijo Aarnio - the Finnish Data Protection Ombudsman - was interviewed on the following questions:

1. What activities and functions does the Finnish data commissioner's office undertake?

2. What powers does the Finnish Data commissioner's office have? In your opinion, are these sufficient? Which powers have been most useful? If there is a lack, what would you feel is needed?

3. How is the office of the Finnish data protection commissioner funded?

4. What is the organizational structure at the Office of the Finnish Data Protection Commissioner and the responsibilities of the key executives?

5. If India creates a Privacy Commissioner, what structure/framework would you suggest for the office?

6. What challenges has your office faced?

7. What is the most common type of privacy violation that your office is faced with?

8. Does your office differ from other EU data protection commissioner offices?

9. How do you think data should be regulated in India?

10. Do you support the idea of co-regulation or self-regulation?

11. How can India protect its citizens' data when it is stored in foreign servers?

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/interview-with-finnish-data-protection-ombudsman

सावधान आपके प्रोफ़ाइल पर है पुलिस की नज़र!

praskrishna — 2013-07-31T04:10:37Z

जन लोकपाल, दिल्ली रेप केस और बाबा रामदेव के आंदोलनों में उमड़ी भीड़ से घबराई सरकारी एजेंसियां अब सोशल मीडिया पर कड़ी नज़र रखने के लिए मैदान में उतरी हैं.

This blog post by Parul Aggarwal was published by BBC on July 18, 2013. Pranesh Prakash is quoted.

अपनी तरह के एक पहले मामले में मुंबई पुलिस ने क्लिक करें फ़ेसबुक-ट्विटर और दूसरे सोशल मीडिया पर आम लोगों की राय और उनकी भावनाओं पर निगरानी रखने की शुरुआत की है.

साइबर अपराधियों और इंटरनेट पर क्लिक करें गड़बड़ियां फैलाने वालों के अलावा अब पुलिस की नज़र उन लोगों पर भी रहेगी जो राजनीतिक-सामाजिक मुद्दों पर सोशल मीडिया में जमकर बोलते हैं.

आम लोग बने मुसीबत?

पुलिस की मंशा है समय रहते ये जानना कि जनता किन मुद्दो पर लामबंद हो रही है और विरोध प्रदर्शनों के दौरान बड़े स्तर पर लोगों का रुझान किस तरफ़ है.

सोशल मीडिया मॉनिटरिंग का ये काम मार्च 2013 में शुरु किए गए मुंबई पुलिस के सोशल मीडिया लैब के ज़रिए किया जाएगा. मुंबई पुलिस के एक वरिष्ठ अधिकारी ने बीबीसी से हुई बातचीत में कहा, ''नौजवान आजकल फ़ेसबुक पर ख़ासे एक्टिव हैं, ये लोग नासमझ हैं और बात-बात पर उग्र हो जाते हैं. सोशल मीडिया लैब के ज़रिए हम ये देखते हैं कि कौन किस मुद्दे पर ज़्यादा से ज़्यादा लिख रहा है और किस तरह की प्रतिक्रिया दे रहा है.''

दिल्ली रेप केस हो या इस तरह के दूसरे पब्लिक मूवमेंट, पिछले दिनों ऐसे कई मामले हुए हैं जब पुलिस ये नहीं जान पाई कि लोग क्या सोच रहे हैं या कितनी हद तक और कितनी बड़ी संख्या में लामबंद हो रहे हैं. हमारा काम है सोशल मीडिया पर नज़र रखते हुए पुलिस को ये बताना कि लोग किन चीज़ों के बारे में बात कर रहे हैं किस तरह के मुद्दे ज़ोर पकड़ रहे हैं."
रजत गर्ग, सीईओ सोशलऐप्सएचक्यू

इस काम में पुलिस को तकनीकी मदद मिल रही है नैसकॉम और तकनीकी क्षेत्र की एक निजी कंपनी ‘सोशलऐप्सएचक्यू’ से.

सोशल मीडिया पर लामबंदी

सोशलऐप्सएचक्यू के सीईओ रजत गर्ग ने बीबीसी से हुई बातचीत में कहा, ''दिल्ली रेप केस हो या इस तरह के दूसरे पब्लिक मूवमेंट, पिछले दिनों ऐसे कई मामले हुए हैं जब पुलिस ये नहीं जान पाई कि लोग क्या सोच रहे हैं या कितनी हद तक और कितनी बड़ी संख्या में लामबंद हो रहे हैं. हमारा काम है सोशल मीडिया पर नज़र रखते हुए पुलिस को ये बताना कि लोग किन चीज़ों के बारे में बात कर रहे हैं किस तरह के मुद्दे ज़ोर पकड़ रहे हैं. ''

फ़ेसबुक-ट्विटर पर क्लिक करें निगरानी कोई नई बात नहीं लेकिन अब तक ये काम ज्यादातर मार्केटिंग कंपनियां ही करती आई हैं. लेकिन सोशलऐप्सएचक्यू जैसी कंपनियां जो कर रही हैं वो 'ओपन सोर्स इंटेलिजेंस' यानी सार्वजनिक स्रोतों से मिली संवेदनशील जानिकारियों को इकट्ठा करना है.

विशेष सॉफ्टवेयर्स की मदद

रजत गर्ग के मुताबिक़, “इंटरनेट को खंगालने और जानकारियां जुटाने का काम सॉफ्टवेयर करते हैं और जानकारियों को समझने और इन पर निगरानी का काम तकनीकी विशेषज्ञों की टीम. इससे ये देखा जा सकता है कि कि कौन से मुद्दे ज़ोर पकड़ रहे हैं और कौन लोग इन्हें लेकर सबसे ज़्यादा एक्टिव हैं. इन लोगों के सोशल नेटवर्क के ज़रिए ये जाना जा सकता है कि किसकी पहुंच कितने लोगों तक है और कोई भी गतिविधिति क्या रुप ले सकती है.’’ सरकार की दलील है कि जो जानकारियां सोशल मीडिया पर क्लिक करें सार्वजनिक रुप से मौजूद हैं केवल उन्हीं की निगरानी की जाती है. हालांकि तकनीक के जानकार कहते हैं कि भारत में प्राइवेसी से जुड़े क़ानून बेहद लचर हैं और फ़ेसबुक-ट्विटर का इस्तेमाल करने वाले ज्यादातर लोग अपनी निजी जानकारियां छिपाने जैसी तकनीकों से अनजान हैं.	अपनी वेबसाइट पर आपत्तिजनक सामग्री डालने को लेकर कार्टूनिस्ट असीम त्रिवेदी को भी गिरफ्तार किया गया था.

रजत गर्ग के मुताबिक़, “इंटरनेट को खंगालने और जानकारियां जुटाने का काम सॉफ्टवेयर करते हैं और जानकारियों को समझने और इन पर निगरानी का काम तकनीकी विशेषज्ञों की टीम. इससे ये देखा जा सकता है कि कि कौन से मुद्दे ज़ोर पकड़ रहे हैं और कौन लोग इन्हें लेकर सबसे ज़्यादा एक्टिव हैं. इन लोगों के सोशल नेटवर्क के ज़रिए ये जाना जा सकता है कि किसकी पहुंच कितने लोगों तक है और कोई भी गतिविधिति क्या रुप ले सकती है.’’

सरकार की दलील है कि जो जानकारियां सोशल मीडिया पर क्लिक करें सार्वजनिक रुप से मौजूद हैं केवल उन्हीं की निगरानी की जाती है. हालांकि तकनीक के जानकार कहते हैं कि भारत में प्राइवेसी से जुड़े क़ानून बेहद लचर हैं और फ़ेसबुक-ट्विटर का इस्तेमाल करने वाले ज्यादातर लोग अपनी निजी जानकारियां छिपाने जैसी तकनीकों से अनजान हैं.

अपनी वेबसाइट पर आपत्तिजनक सामग्री डालने को लेकर कार्टूनिस्ट असीम त्रिवेदी को भी गिरफ्तार किया गया था.

पारदर्शिता की कमी

ऐसे में सार्वजनिक मंच पर कई ऐसी जानकारियां उपलब्ध हो सकती हैं जो उन्हें पुलिस की आंख की किरकिरी बना दें.

साल 2012 में पूर्व शिवसेना प्रमुख बाला साहब ठाकरे की निधन के मौक़े पर बुलाए गए मुंबई बंद के ख़िलाफ़ फ़ेसबुक पर टिप्पणी करने वाली एक लड़की और उसकी पोस्ट को लाइक करने वाली उसकी दोस्त को रातोंरात गिरफ्तार कर लिया गया. पुलिस ने ये कार्रवाई एक स्थानीय शिवसेना नेता की शिकायत पर की थी.

कथित तौर पर संविधान का मज़ाक उड़ाने और अपनी वेबसाइट पर आपत्तिजनक सामग्री डालने को लेकर कार्टूनिस्ट असीम त्रिवेदी को भी गिरफ्तार किया गया. मीडिया में हुए हंगामे के बाद सभी लोगों को छोड़ दिया गया लेकिन भारत में अब तक इस तरह के कई ऐसे मामले सामने आ चुके हैं.

सूचना प्रौद्योगिकी क़ानून की धारा 66 कहती है कि इस तरह की कार्रवाई बेहद संवेदनशील और राष्ट्रहित से जुड़े मामलों में ही की जानी चाहिए. हालांकि धारा 66 की आड़ में सरकार और नेताओं के ख़िलाफ़ बोलने वालों की गिरफ्तारी सरकार की मंशा पर कई सवाल खड़े करती है.

इंटरनेट से जुड़े मुद्दों पर काम करने वाली संस्थाएं मानती हैं कि भारत में इंटरनेट और आम लोगों पर निगरानी रखने के मामले में सरकार की ओर से पारदर्शिता की बेहद कमी है.

'दुरुपयोग की संभावना'

द सेंटर फ़ॉर इंटरनेट एंड सोसाएटी से जुड़े प्रनेश प्रकाश कहते हैं, ''भारत में सूचना प्रौद्योगिकी और इंटरनेट से जुड़े क़ानूनों को अगर पढ़ें तो समझ आता है कि वो कितने ख़राब तरीक़े से लिखे गए हैं. इन क़ानूनों में स्पष्टता और जवाबदेही की गुंजाइश न होने के कारण ही उनका इस्तेमाल तोड़-मरोड़ कर किया जाता है.''

सोशल मीडिया के ज़रिए इंटरनेट पर सार्वजनिक रुप से बहुत कुछ हो रहा है. कुच्छेक मामलों को छोड़कर चीन जैसे देशों के मुकाबले अभिव्यक्ति की स्वतंत्रता को लेकर भारत सरकार ने अबतक कोई दमनकारी नीति नहीं अपनाई है. लेकिन समस्या ये है कि तकनीक की मदद से अगर दिन-रात निगरानी होगी और जानकारियां सामने आएंगी तो उनके दुरुपयोग की संभावना बढ़ जाती है. "

प्रनेश कहते हैं, ''साल 2011 में सरकार ने केंद्रीय मंत्रालयों और विभागों के लिए सोशल मीडिया से जुड़े दिशा-निर्देश जारी किए. इसका मक़सद था सरकारी विभागों को ये बताना कि सोशल मीडिया पर आम लोगों से कैसे जुड़ें. यही वजह है कि जब सरकार और पुलिस से जुड़े विभागों ने सोशल मीडिया लैब बनाए तो ज्यादातर लोगों ने समझा कि इनका मक़सद जनता की निगरानी नहीं बल्कि आम लोगों से जुड़ना है.''

तो मुंबई पुलिस का ये क़दम क्या आम लोगों और मानवाधिकार संगठनों के लिए ख़तरे की घंटी है ?

प्रनेश कहते हैं, “सोशल मीडिया के ज़रिए इंटरनेट पर सार्वजनिक रुप से बहुत कुछ हो रहा है. कुछ एक मामलों को छोड़कर चीन जैसे देशों के मुक़ाबले अभिव्यक्ति की स्वतंत्रता को लेकर भारत सरकार ने अब तक कोई दमनकारी नीति नहीं अपनाई है. लेकिन समस्या ये है कि तकनीक की मदद से अगर दिन-रात निगरानी होगी और जानकारियां सामने आएंगी तो उनके दुरुपयोग की संभावना बढ़ जाती है.”

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/bbc-uk-july-18-2013-parul-aggarwal-social-media-monitoring

Can India Trust Its Government on Privacy?

pranesh — 2013-07-15T10:35:33Z

In response to criticisms of the Centralized Monitoring System, India’s new surveillance program, the government could contend that merely having the capability to engage in mass surveillance won’t mean that it will. Officials will argue that they will still abide by the law and will ensure that each instance of interception will be authorized.

Pranesh Prakash's article was published in the New York Times on July 11, 2013.

In fact, they will argue that the program, known as C.M.S., will better safeguard citizens’ privacy: it will cut out the telecommunications companies, which can be sources of privacy leaks; it will ensure that each interception request is tracked and the recorded content duly destroyed within six months as is required under the law; and it will enable quicker interception, which will save more lives. But there are a host of reasons why the citizens of India should be skeptical of those official claims.

Cutting out telecoms will not help protect citizens from electronic snooping since these companies still have the requisite infrastructure to conduct surveillance. As long as the infrastructure exists, telecom employees will misuse it. In a 2010 report, the journalist M.A. Arun noted that “alarmingly, this correspondent also came across several instances of service providers’ employees accessing personal communication of subscribers without authorization.” Some years back, K.K. Paul, a top Delhi Police officer and now the Governor of Meghalaya, drafted a memo in which he noted mobile operators’ complaints that private individuals were misusing police contacts to tap phone calls of “opponents in trade or estranged spouses.”

India does not need to have centralized interception facilities to have centralized tracking of interception requests. To prevent unauthorized access to communications content that has been intercepted, at all points of time, the files should be encrypted using public key infrastructure. Mechanisms also exist to securely allow a chain of custody to be tracked, and to ensure the timely destruction of intercepted material after six months, as required by the law. Such technological means need to be made mandatory to prevent unauthorized access, rather than centralizing all interception capabilities.

At the moment, interception orders are given by the federal Home Secretary of India and by state home secretaries without adequate consideration. Every month at the federal level 7,000 to 9,000 phone taps are authorized or re-authorized. Even if it took just three minutes to evaluate each case, it would take 15 hours each day (without any weekends or holidays) to go through 9,000 requests. The numbers in Indian states could be worse, but one can’t be certain as statistics on surveillance across India are not available. It indicates bureaucratic callousness and indifference toward following the procedure laid down in the Telegraph Act.

In a 1975 case, the Supreme Court held that an “economic emergency” may not amount to a “public emergency.” Yet we find that of the nine central government agencies empowered to conduct interception in India, according to press reports — Central Board of Direct Taxes, Intelligence Bureau, Central Bureau of Investigation, Narcotics Control Bureau, Directorate of Revenue Intelligence, Enforcement Directorate, Research & Analysis Wing, National Investigation Agency and the Defense Intelligence Agency — three are exclusively dedicated to economic offenses.

Suspicion of tax evasion cannot legally justify a wiretap, which is why the government said it had believed that Nira Radia, a corporate lobbyist, was a spy when it defended putting a wiretap on her phone in 2008 and 2009. A 2011 report by the cabinet secretary pointed out that economic offenses might not be counted as “public emergencies,” and that the Central Board of Direct Taxes should not be empowered to intercept communications. Yet the tax department continues to be on the list of agencies empowered to conduct interceptions.

India has arrived at a scary juncture, where the multiple departments of the Indian government don’t even trust each other. India’s Department of Information Technology recently complained to the National Security Advisor that the National Technical Research Organization had hacked into National Informatics Center infrastructure and extracted sensitive data connected to various ministries. The National Technical Research Organization denied it had hacked into the servers but said hundreds of e-mail accounts of top government officials were compromised in 2012, including those of “the home secretary, the naval attaché to Tehran, several Indian missions abroad, top investigators of the Central Bureau of Investigation and the armed forces,” The Mint newspaper reported. Such incidents aggravate the fear that the Indian government might not be willing and able to protect the enormous amounts of information it is about to collect through the C.M.S.

Simply put, government entities have engaged in unofficial and illegal surveillance, and the C.M.S. is not likely to change this. In a 2010 article in Outlook, the journalist Saikat Datta described how various central and state intelligence organizations across India are illegally using off-the-air interception devices. “These systems are frequently deployed in Muslim-dominated areas of cities like Delhi, Lucknow and Hyderabad,” Mr. Datta wrote. “The systems, mounted inside cars, are sent on ‘fishing expeditions,’ randomly tuning into conversations of citizens in a bid to track down terrorists.”

The National Technical Research Organization, which is not even on the list of entities authorized to conduct interception, is one of the largest surveillance organizations in India. The Mint reported last year that the organization’s surveillance devices, “contrary to norms, were deployed more often in the national capital than in border areas” and that under new standard operating procedures issued in early 2012, the organization can only intercept signals at the international borders. The organization runs multiple facilities in Mumbai, Bangalore, Delhi, Hyderabad, Lucknow and Kolkata, in which monumental amounts of Internet traffic are captured. In Mumbai, all the traffic passing through the undersea cables there is captured, Mr. Datta found.

In the western state of Gujarat, a recent investigation by Amitabh Pathak, the director general of police, revealed that in a period of less than six months, more than 90,000 requests were made for call detail records, including for the phones of senior police and civil service officers. This high a number could not possibly have been generated from criminal investigations alone. Again, these do not seem to have led to any criminal charges against any of the people whose records were obtained. The information seems to have been collected for purposes other than national security.

India is struggling to keep track of the location of its proliferating interception devices. More than 73,000 devices to intercept mobile phone calls have been imported into India since 2005. In 2011, the federal government asked various state governments, private corporations, the army and intelligence agencies to surrender these to the government, noting that usage of any such equipment for surveillance was illegal. We don’t know how many devices were actually turned in.

These kinds of violations of privacy can have very dangerous consequences. According to the former Intelligence Bureau head in the western state of Gujarat, R.B. Sreekumar, the call records of a mobile number used by Haren Pandya, the former Gujarat home minister, were used to confirm that it was he who had provided secret testimony to the Citizens’ Tribunal, which was conducting an independent investigation of the 2002 sectarian riots in the state. Mr. Pandya was murdered in 2003.

The limited efforts to make India’s intelligence agencies more accountable have gone nowhere. In 2012, the Planning Commission of India formed a group of experts under Justice A.P. Shah, a retired Chief Justice of the Delhi High Court, to look into existing projects of the government and to suggest principles to guide a privacy law in light of international experience. (Centre for Internet and Society, where I work was part of the group). However, the government has yet to introduce a bill to protect citizens’ privacy, even though the governmental and private sector violations of Indian citizens’ privacy is growing at an alarming rate.

In February, after frequent calls by privacy activists and lawyers for greater accountability and parliamentary oversight of intelligence agencies, the Centre for Public Interest Litigation filed a case in the Supreme Court. This would, one hopes, lead to reform.

Citizens must also demand that a strong Privacy Act be enacted. In 1991, the leak of a Central Bureau of Investigation report titled “Tapping of Politicians’ Phones” prompted the rights groups, People’s Union of Civil Liberties to file a writ petition, which eventually led to a Supreme Court of India ruling that recognized the right to privacy of communications for all citizens as part of the fundamental rights of freedom of speech and of life and personal liberty. However, through the 2008 amendments to the Information Technology Act, the IT Rules framed in 2011 and the telecom licenses, the government has greatly weakened the right to privacy as recognized by the Supreme Court. The damage must be undone through a strong privacy law that safeguards the privacy of Indian citizens against both the state and corporations. The law should not only provide legal procedures, but also ensure that the government should not employ technologies that erode legal procedures.

A strong privacy law should provide strong grounds on which to hold the National Security Advisor’s mass surveillance of Indians (over 12.1 billion pieces of intelligence in one month) as unlawful. The law should ensure that Parliament, and Indian citizens, are regularly provided information on the scale of surveillance across India, and the convictions resulting from that surveillance. Individuals whose communications metadata or content is monitored or intercepted should be told about it after the passage of a reasonable amount of time. After all, the data should only be gathered if it is to charge a person of committing a crime. If such charges are not being brought, the person should be told of the incursion into his or her privacy.

The privacy law should ensure that all surveillance follows the following principles: legitimacy (is the surveillance for a legitimate, democratic purpose?), necessity (is this necessary to further that purpose? does a less invasive means exist?), proportionality and harm minimization (is this the minimum level of intrusion into privacy?), specificity (is this surveillance order limited to a specific case?) transparency (is this intrusion into privacy recorded and also eventually revealed to the data subject?), purpose limitation (is the data collected only used for the stated purpose?), and independent oversight (is the surveillance reported to a legislative committee or a privacy commissioner, and are statistics kept on surveillance conducted and criminal prosecution filings?). Constitutional courts such as the Supreme Court of India or the High Courts in the Indian states should make such determinations. Citizens should have a right to civil and criminal remedies for violations of surveillance laws.

Indian citizens should also take greater care of their own privacy and safeguard the security of their communications. The solution is to minimize usage of mobile phones and to use anonymizing technologies and end-to-end encryption while communicating on the Internet. Free and open-source software like OpenPGP can make e-mails secure. Technologies like off-the-record messaging used in apps like ChatSecure and Pidgin chat conversations, TextSecure for text messages, HTTPS Everywhere and Virtual Private Networks can prevent Internet service providers from being able to snoop, and make Internet communications anonymous.

Indian government, and especially our intelligence agencies, violate Indian citizens’ privacy without legal authority on a routine basis. It is time India stops itself from sleepwalking into a surveillance state.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/new-york-times-july-11-2013-can-india-trust-its-government-on-piracy

How Surveillance Works in India

pranesh — 2013-07-15T10:20:45Z

When the Indian government announced it would start a Centralized Monitoring System in 2009 to monitor telecommunications in the country, the public seemed unconcerned. When the government announced that the system, also known as C.M.S., commenced in April, the news didn’t receive much attention.

This article by Pranesh Prakash was published in the New York Times on July 10, 2013.

After a colleague at the Centre for Internet and Society wrote about the program and it was lambasted by Human Rights Watch, more reporters started covering it as a privacy issue. But it was ultimately the revelations by Edward J. Snowden about American surveillance that prompted Indians to ask questions about its own government’s surveillance programs.

In India, we have a strange mix of great amounts of transparency and very little accountability when it comes to surveillance and intelligence agencies. Many senior officials are happy to anonymously brief reporters about the state of surveillance, but there is very little that is officially made public, and still less is debated in the national press and in Parliament.

This lack of accountability is seen both in the way the Big-Brother acronyms (C.M.S., Natgrid, T.C.I.S., C.C.T.N.S., etc.) have been rolled out, as well as the murky status of the intelligence agencies. No intelligence agency in India has been created under an act of Parliament with clearly established roles and limitations on powers, and hence there is no public accountability whatsoever.

The absence of accountability has meant that the government has since 2006 been working on the C.M.S., which will integrate with the Telephone Call Interception System that is also being rolled out. The cost: around 8 billion rupees ($132 million) — more than four times the initial estimate of 1.7 billion — and even more important, our privacy and personal liberty. Under their licensing terms, all Internet service providers and telecom providers are required to provide the government direct access to all communications passing through them. However, this currently happens in a decentralized fashion, and the government in most cases has to ask the telecoms for metadata, like call detail records, visited Web sites, IP address assignments, or to carry out the interception and provide the recordings to the government. Apart from this, the government uses equipment to gain access to vast quantities of raw data traversing the Internet across multiple cities, including the data going through the undersea cables that land in Mumbai.

With the C.M.S., the government will get centralized access to all communications metadata and content traversing through all telecom networks in India. This means that the government can listen to all your calls, track a mobile phone and its user’s location, read all your text messages, personal e-mails and chat conversations. It can also see all your Google searches, Web site visits, usernames and passwords if your communications aren’t encrypted.


A man surfing a Facebook page at an internet cafe in Guwahati, Assam, on Dec. 6, 2011. Image Credit: Anupam Nath/Associated Press

You might ask: Why is this a problem when the government already had the same access, albeit in a decentralized fashion? To answer that question, one has to first examine the law.

There are no laws that allow for mass surveillance in India. The two laws covering interception are the Indian Telegraph Act of 1885 and the Information Technology Act of 2000, as amended in 2008, and they restrict lawful interception to time-limited and targeted interception.The targeted interception both these laws allow ordinarily requires case-by-case authorization by either the home secretary or the secretary of the department of information technology.

Interestingly, the colonial government framed better privacy safeguards into communications interception than did the post-independence democratic Indian state. The Telegraph Act mandates that interception of communications can only be done on account of a public emergency or for public safety. If either of those two preconditions is satisfied, then the government may cite any of the following five reasons: “the sovereignty and integrity of India, the security of the state, friendly relations with foreign states, or public order, or for preventing incitement to the commission of an offense.” In 2008, the Information Technology Act copied much of the interception provision of the Telegraph Act but removed the preconditions of public emergency or public safety, and expands the power of the government to order interception for “investigation of any offense.” The IT Act thus very substantially lowers the bar for wiretapping.

Apart from these two provisions, which apply to interception, there are many laws that cover recorded metadata, all of which have far lower standards. Under the Code of Criminal Procedure, no court order is required unless the entity is seen to be a “postal or telegraph authority” — and generally e-mail providers and social networking sites are not seen as such.

Unauthorized access to communications data is not punishable per se, which is why a private detective who gained access to the cellphone records of Arun Jaitley, a Bharatiya Janata Party leader, has been charged under the weak provision on fraud, rather than invasion of privacy. While there is a provision in the Telegraph Act to punish unlawful interception, it carries a far lesser penalty (up to three years of imprisonment) than for a citizen’s failure to assist an agency that wishes to intercept or monitor or decrypt (up to seven years of imprisonment).

To put the ridiculousness of the penalty in Sections 69 and 69 B of the IT Act provision in perspective, an Intelligence Bureau officer who spills national secrets may be imprisoned up to three years. And under the Indian Penal Code, failing to provide a document one is legally bound to provide to a public servant, the punishment can be up to one month’s imprisonment. Further, a citizen who refuses to assist an authority in decryption, as one is required to under Section 69, may simply be exercising her constitutional right against self-incrimination. For these reasons and more, these provisions of the IT Act are arguably unconstitutional.

As bad as the IT Act is, legally the government has done far worse. In the licenses that the Department of Telecommunications grants Internet service providers, cellular providers and telecoms, there are provisions that require them to provide direct access to all communications data and content even without a warrant, which is not permitted by the existing laws on interception. The licenses also force cellular providers to have ‘bulk encryption’ of less than 40 bits. (Since G.S.M. network encryption systems like A5/1, A5/2, and A5/3 have a fixed encryption bit length of 64 bits, providers in India have been known use A5/0, that is, no encryption, thus meaning any person — not just the government — can use off-the-air interception techniques to listen to your calls.)

Cybercafes (but not public phone operators) are required to maintain detailed records of clients’ identity proofs, photographs and the Web sites they have visited, for a minimum period of one year. Under the rules designed as India’s data protection law (oh, the irony!), sensitive personal data has to be shared with government agencies, if required for “purpose of verification of identity, or for prevention, detection, investigation including cyber incidents, prosecution, and punishment of offenses.”

Along similar lines, in the rules meant to say when an Internet intermediary may be held liable for a user’s actions, there is a provision requiring the Internet company to “provide information or any such assistance to government agencies legally authorized for investigative, protective, cybersecurity activity.” (Incoherent, vague and grammatically incorrect sentences are a consistent feature of laws drafted by the Ministry of Communications and IT; one of the telecom licenses states: “The licensee should make arrangement for monitoring simultaneous calls by government security agencies,” when clearly they meant “for simultaneous monitoring of calls.”)

In a landmark 1996 judgment, the Indian Supreme Court held that telephone tapping is a serious invasion of an individual’s privacy and that the citizens’ right to privacy has to be protected from abuse by the authorities. Given this, undoubtedly governments must have explicit permission from their legislatures to engage in any kind of broadening of electronic surveillance powers. Yet, without introducing any new laws, the government has surreptitiously granted itself powers — powers that Parliament hasn’t authorized it to exercise — by sneaking such powers into provisions in contracts and in subordinate legislation.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/nytimes-july-10-2013-pranesh-prakash-how-surveillance-works-in-india

CIS Cybersecurity Series (Part 6) - Lhadon Tethong

purba — 2013-08-01T09:54:46Z

CIS interviews Lhadon Tethong, Tibetan human rights activist, as part of the Cybersecurity Series

"In authoritarian states, and in this case, in Tibet, I think that every person that we can teach and pass knowledge to, that can help them stay out of jail, stay in the streets, for one, two, three days longer, one week longer, that is a valuable time of time and resources. And I think we cannot rely on only tools and technology solutions to protect people. I think we can't just rely on government policies at the highest levels, and on export controls... the approach to digital security has to be comprehensive and we have to engage citizens. And not just in cases like the Tibetans or for activists or for people living under repression, but for people in free and open societies too." - Lhadon Tethong, Tibetan human rights activist.

Centre for Internet and Society presents its sixth installment of the CIS Cybersecurity Series.

The CIS Cybersecurity Series seeks to address hotly debated aspects of cybersecurity and hopes to encourage wider public discourse around the topic.

In this installment, CIS interviews Lhadon Tethong, Tibetan human rights activist. Lhadon is the Director of the Tibet Action Institute, where she leads a team of technologists and human rights advocates in developing and advancing open-source communication technologies, nonviolent strategies and innovative training programs for Tibetans and other groups facing heavy repression and human rights abuses.

Link for Tibet Action Institute: https://tibetaction.net/

This work was carried out as part of the Cyber Stewards Network with aid of a grant from the International Development Research Centre, Ottawa, Canada.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/cis-cybersecurity-series-part-6-lhadon-tethong

How the world’s largest democracy is preparing to snoop on its citizens

praskrishna — 2013-07-15T09:41:21Z

Monitoring system will allow govt to snoop on voice calls, SMSes, and access Internet data.

The article by Leslie D' Monte and Joji Thomas Philip was published in Livemint on July 3, 2013. Sunil Abraham is quoted.

Nothing will be secret or private.

Every conversation on landlines and mobile phones will be heard; some will be recorded. Every move you make on the Internet will be tracked.

Fiction?

By December, when the Nanny State goes live, it will be fact.

Once the government’s innocuously named CMS (communication monitoring system) is in place, the state will be able to snoop on your voice calls, fax messages, SMSes and MMSes, across all phone networks. It will be able to access your Internet data, and see not just what sites you visit but even build a cache of your inbox, to decrypt at leisure.

The process began more than a couple of years ago.

On 29 April 2011, India’s home ministry called for bids to set up communications monitoring systems in all state capitals. The notice, which was published on its website and went almost unnoticed, specified that the system should be able to monitor voice calls, fax messages, SMSes and MMSes, and work across terrestrial networks, GSM and CDMA (the dominant mobile telephony platforms), and the Internet.

	The tender specified that the system should be able to listen in live, and be able to analyse intercepted data. It should have the ability to record, store and playback, without interfering “with the operation of telecommunication network or make the target aware that he is being monitored”. The CMS is no longer a concept. It has undergone successful pilots and is likely to be commissioned by the year-end, according to an internal note dated 10 June from the department of telecommunications (DoT). A top government official, who did not want to be named, said the CMS centralized data centre is likely to be ready by July and commissioned by October. The official also added that the Centre for Development of Telematics (C-DoT), the government’s telecom technology arm, has “signed an agreement with the Centre for Artificial Intelligence and Robotics (CAIR) for Internet Service Provider integration”. This agreement will allow monitoring agencies to track an individual’s Internet use.

The tender specified that the system should be able to listen in live, and be able to analyse intercepted data. It should have the ability to record, store and playback, without interfering “with the operation of telecommunication network or make the target aware that he is being monitored”.

The CMS is no longer a concept. It has undergone successful pilots and is likely to be commissioned by the year-end, according to an internal note dated 10 June from the department of telecommunications (DoT).

A top government official, who did not want to be named, said the CMS centralized data centre is likely to be ready by July and commissioned by October. The official also added that the Centre for Development of Telematics (C-DoT), the government’s telecom technology arm, has “signed an agreement with the Centre for Artificial Intelligence and Robotics (CAIR) for Internet Service Provider integration”. This agreement will allow monitoring agencies to track an individual’s Internet use.

Subsequent media reports, which have cited internal government documents, peg the cost of the CMS at around Rs.400 crore, but there is hardly any official data from the government about the implementation of the CMS.

In its 2012-13 annual report, DoT said the government has decided to set up the CMS for lawful interception and monitoring by law enforcement agencies, “reducing the manual intervention at many stages as well as saving of time”.

The system, according to the report, was to be installed by C-DoT after which the Telecom Enforcement, Resource and Monitoring (TERM) cells would take over. As on 31 March, there were 34 such TERM cells in the country. The current number could not be ascertained.

How does the government justify this invasive system? Its purpose is unclear, but national security is always a handy spectre. And so what if such a system can be misused to bully, spy and curtail the freedom of individuals? Indeed, India’s track record of using existing laws doesn’t inspire confidence.

Student Shaheen Dhada was arrested (under the law) for criticizing the shutdown of Mumbai after the death of Shiv Sena supremo Bal Thackeray on her personal Facebook account. Her friend, Renu Srinivasan, who had “liked” the comment was also arrested. The two were later freed, on bail.

No known safeguards

But how does the CMS work? According to the government official cited above, the Central Bureau for Investigation (CBI), for instance, is likely to be provided interception facilities through the CMS in Delhi initially.

“CBI shall enter data related to target in the CMS system and approach the telecom services provider”, at which point the process is automated, and the provider simply sends the data to a server which forwards the requested information, he explained.

He didn’t mention any safeguards, nor have any been made public, which means that there are likely none. In a Q&A session on the popular social network Reddit on Tuesday, academic and activist Lawrence Lessig, the co-founder of Creative Commons, wrote on the subject of snooping in the US, “I’m really troubled by national security programmes. We don’t know what protections are built into the system.”

That has become the subject of much debate following the leaks by whistleblower Edward Snowden about the US National Security Agency’s surveillance programme.

Lessig pointed out that protection based on code is the only real protection from misuse, as other safeguards are dependent on people choosing not to violate reasonable expectations of privacy.

Which is the heart of the problem. From what we know, the list of agencies with access to data in India is already large: the Research and Analysis Wing, CBI, the National Investigation Agency, the Central Board of Direct Taxes, the Narcotics Control Bureau, and the Enforcement Directorate. More may be added.

For the system to be useful in any practical fashion, access will have to be given to a large number of officials in each of these agencies. And in the absence of safeguards, one must assume that all data is accessible to all officials.

To be sure, some of this information is already being tracked by Internet companies.

Ravina Kothari, a 22-year-old student at Cardiff University, said she learnt a bitter lesson “last year when I Googled my name”. “It revealed all the personal details I had put up on social media sites. My childhood school photos popped up on Google image search results. Worse, I had not put them there. My friends had tagged me in—all so scary. And I can’t do anything about it.”

She has since stopped uploading personal details such as videos, pictures or telephone numbers.

Twenty-one-year-old Shruti Lodha, studying to be a chartered accountant, feels a similar discomfort.

“I am definitely not comfortable with Google, and how every time I Google myself it reveals my identity and shows information that is on social media sites.”

In 2011, 24-year-old Max Schrems of Vienna, Austria, asked the world’s largest social networking site Facebook Inc. for a copy of every piece of information it had collected on him since he had created an account with it two years earlier.

Schrems was delivered a CD packing a 1,222-page file that included information he had deleted, but had been stored on Facebook’s servers, according to ThreatPost, a publication on information technology (IT) security run by Kaspersky Lab, a leading maker of antivirus software.

Had Schrems been a resident of India, he could not have known how much personal information Facebook had on him. Every person in the European Union (EU) has the right to access all the data that a company holds on him or her.

With the CMS, all this information, and much more, can be called up by just about anyone—the taxman, CBI officials, Assam Police (which will also monitor the network according to some reports)—and the old bogey of national security may not even be raised.

Need for a privacy law

Publicly at least, companies agree that the new monitoring systems infringe on our rights. Subho Ray, president, Internet and Mobile Association of India said, “Without any prior permission, government should not take or use any information which is considered private. The biggest challenge for us is that we do not have a privacy law in India.”

Cyber law experts and privacy lobby groups caution that the world’s largest democracy’s attempt to snoop on its citizens with the CMS, ostensibly for security reasons, could be abused in the absence of a transparent process and a privacy law.

The issue has become alarming, they add, with the US admitting to be collecting billions of pieces of information on immigrants—6.3 billion from Indian citizens alone under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, according to an 8 June report in the UK-based The Guardian newspaper.

“We don’t know much about the CMS, except that when implemented, it could be plugged directly into telecom nodes and lead to widespread tapping,” said Apar Gupta, a partner at law firm Advani and Co. specializing in IT law.

“There’s no legal sanction as of now for any type of mass surveillance, such as the one that the CMS suggests,” said Pavan Duggal, a Supreme Court lawyer and cyberlaw expert.

Gupta added that since India lacks privacy legislation, which obliges companies to maintain privacy standards when they export the data which they’ve gathered in India overseas, “this poses a problem”.

N.S. Nappinai, a Bombay high court advocate, said, “India has lived without any codified laws to protect privacy all these years and has relied primarily on Article 21 of the Constitution. Protecting privacy has just become more complicated with the humongous quantity of data being uploaded online. People seem totally unaware of the trouble they are inviting upon themselves.”

Current laws are already compromised

The lack of a privacy law makes it easier for the government to take such extreme steps. The Indian Telegraph Act and the IT Act, 2008 (amendments introduced in the IT Act, 2000), already gives the government the power to monitor, intercept and even block online conversations and websites. The addition of the CMS will greatly widen the number of sources and could simplify access to these records as well.

On 25 April 2011, the government admitted that the existing laws include provisions for interception and pointed out that the Supreme Court had, on 18 December 1996, upheld the constitutional validity of interceptions and monitoring.

While the court had added that telephone tapping infringes on the right to life and the right to freedom of speech and expression, unless permitted under special procedures, these guidelines are not usually implemented, according to activists.

The shortcomings of the existing laws already make it possible to misuse the vast amount of information that is available today. These laws were written at a time when the Internet was not a fact of life, and where the lines between public and private were not already blurred. Given that, the perspectives on privacy can be worrisome.

In a report presented to the Lok Sabha on 13 December 2011, the ministry of planning said, “Collection of information without a privacy law in place does not violate the right to privacy of the individual…There is no bar on collecting information, the only requirement to be fulfilled with respect to the protection of the privacy of an individual is that care should be taken in collection and use of information, consent of individual would be relevant, information should be kept safe and confidential.”

This proposed Right to Privacy Bill was leaked to the public, and eventually nothing came of it.

On 16 October 2012, a commission headed by justice (retired) A.P. Shah issued a report that included the study of privacy laws and related Bills from around the world. The report noted that with the “increased collection of citizen information by the government, concerns have emerged on their impact on the privacy of persons”.

Despite the report being given to the Planning Commission, the government has continued with its plans.

Early this year, a privacy lobby body, the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) drafted the Privacy (Protection) Bill 2013, with the objective of contributing to privacy legislation in India.

CIS worked with the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry and the Data Security Council of India and held round table meetings around the country to bring about a privacy law.

Sunil Abraham, executive director, CIS, said, “While the government sets out to protect national interests, it’s also very important to protect the rights of individuals.”

The way ahead

Human Rights Watch, in a 7 June media release, described the CMS as “chilling, given its (India’s) reckless and irresponsible use of sedition and Internet laws”.

According to Freedom on the Net 2012, released on 24 September, India—which scored 39 points out of 100—was termed “partly-free”. But India is not alone. Around 40 countries filter the Internet in varying degrees, including democratic and non-democratic governments.

YouTube and Gmail (both owned by Google Inc.), BlackBerry, WikiLeaks, Skype (owned by Microsoft Corp.), Twitter and Facebook have all been censored, at different times, in countries such as China, Iran, Egypt and India.

European Union countries have strong privacy laws as is evident from the Schrems case.

Australia is engaged in putting similar safeguards in place. On 24 June, a Senate committee recommended that Australia’s proposed data retention scheme only be considered if it just collected metadata, avoided capture of browser histories and contained rigorous privacy controls and oversight.

Indian politicians could take a cue from such countries when balancing national interest with protecting the privacy of individuals.

Gopal Sathe in New Delhi and Zahra Khan in Mumbai contributed to this story.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/livemint-leslie-d-monte-joji-thomas-philip-july-3-2013-how-the-worlds-largest-democracy-is-preparing-to-snoop-on-its-citizens

India’s Central Monitoring System: Security can’t come at cost of privacy

praskrishna — 2013-07-15T06:43:21Z

During a Google hangout session in June this year, Milind Deora, minister of state for communications and information technology, addressed concerns related to the central monitoring system (CMS).

Danish Raza's article was published in FirstPost on July 10, 2013. Sunil Abraham is quoted.

The surveillance project, described as the Indian version of PRISM, will allow the government to monitor online and telephone data of citizens. prism-milind-deora-cms-central-monitoring-system/” target=”_blank”>

The minister tried to justify the project arguing that the union government will become the sole custodian of citizen’s data which is now accessible to other parties such as telecom operators. But his justification failed to persuade experts who argue that the data is hardly safe because it is held by the government. And the limited information available about the project has raised serious concerns about its need and the consequences of government snooping on such a mass scale.

A release by the Press Information Bureau, dated November 26, 2009, is perhaps the only government document related to CMS available in public domain. It merely states that the project will strengthen the security environment in the country. “In the existing system secrecy can be easily compromised due to manual intervention at many stages while in CMS these functions will be performed on secured electronic link and there will be minimum manual intervention. Interception through CMS will be instant as compared to the existing system which takes a very long time.”

One of the primary concerns raised by experts is the sheer lack of public information on the project. So far, there is no official word from the government about which government bodies or agencies will be able to access the data; how will they use this information; what percentage of population will be under surveillance; or how long the data of a citizen will be kept in the record.

“This makes it impossible for India’s citizens to assess whether surveillance is the only, or the best, way in which the stated goal can be achieved. Also, citizens cannot gauge whether these measures are proportionate i.e. they are the most effective means to achieve this aim. The possibility of having such a debate is crucial in any democratic country,” said Dr Anja Kovacs, project director at Internet Democracy Project, Delhi based NGO working for online freedom of speech and related issues.

There is also no legal recourse for a citizen whose personal details are being misused or leaked from the central or regional database. Unlike America’s PRISM project under which surveillance orders are approved by courts, CMS does not have any judicial oversight. “This means that the larger ecosystem of checks and balances in which any surveillance should be embedded in a democratic country is lacking. There is an urgent requirement for a strong legal protection of the right to privacy; for judicial oversight of any surveillance; and for parliamentary or judicial oversight of the agencies which will do surveillance. At the moment, all three are missing.” said Kovacs.

Given the use of technology by criminals and terrorists, government surveillance per se, seems inevitable. Almost in every nation, certain chunk of population is always under the scanner of intelligence agencies. However, mass-scale tracking the data of all citizens — not just those who are deemed persons of interest — enabled by the CMS has sparked a public furor. Sunil Abraham, executive director, Centre for Internet & Society, Bangalore, compared surveillance with salt in cooking. “A tiny amount is essential but any excess is counterproductive,” he said. “Unlike target surveillance, blanket surveillance increases the probability of false positives. Wrong data analysis will put more number of innocent civilians under suspicion as, by default, their number in the central server is more than those are actually criminals.”

Such blanket surveillance techniques also pose a threat to online business. With all the data going in one central pool, a competitor or a cyber criminal rival can easily tap into private and sensitive information by hacking into the server. “As vulnerabilities will be introduced into Internet infrastructure in order to enable surveillance, it will undermine the security of online transactions,” said Abraham. He notes that the project also can undermine the confidentiality of intellectual property especially pre-grant patents and trade secrets. “Rights-holders will never be sure if their IPR is being stolen by some government in order to prop up national players.”

Every time a surveillance system is exposed or its misuse sparks a debate, governments argue that such programs are required for internal security purposes and to help abort terror attacks. Obama made the same argument after PRISM was revealed to the public. Civil rights groups, on the other hand, argue that security cannot be prioritised by large-scale invasions of privacy especially in a country like India where there is little accountability or transparency. So is there a middle ground that will satisfy both sides?

“Yes, security and privacy can coexist,” said Commander (rtd) Mukesh Saini, former national information security coordinator, government of India, “We can design a system which takes care of national security aspect and yet gains the confidence of the citizens. Secrecy period must not be more than three to four years in such projects. Thereafter who all were snooped and when and why and under whose direction/circumstances must be made public through a website after this time gap.”

Kovacs agrees and says the right kind of surveillance program would focus on the needs of the citizen and not the government. “If a contradiction seems to exist between cyber security and privacy online, this is only because we have lost sight of who is supposed to benefit from any security measures. Only if a measure contributes to citizen’s sense of security, can it really be considered a legitimate security measure.”

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/firstpost-danish-raza-july-10-2013-indias-central-monitoring-system-security-cant-come-at-cost-of-privacy

India's centralised snooping system facing big delays

praskrishna — 2013-07-15T06:35:05Z

Central Monitoring System lacks algorithms, database and data.

This blog post by Phil Muncaster was published in "The Register, UK" on July 9, 2013. The Centre for Internet & Society is mentioned.

After recent revelations about governments snooping on their own citizens, it's nice to know that not every such effort is going smoothly, as India’s much criticised NSA-style Centralised Monitoring System (CMS) is facing big delays after it emerged that the project is still missing the vital software which will allow analysts to search comms data.

The nation's Department of Telecommunications has now told the Center for Development of Telematics (C-DoT), which is installing the system, to speed things up, according to official documents seen by the Wall Street Journal.

The Rs.4 billion (£47.8m) CMS was originally conceived as a way of allowing the authorities to lawfully intercept voice calls and texts, emails, social media and the geographical location of individuals.

However, the Intelligence Bureau, which will be manning the system, has delayed its introduction for several reasons.

Firstly, mobile operators in only seven of the sub-continent’s 22 service areas have been connected to the CMS, leaving holes in its reach.

There’s also a major issue in that the system currently lacks the search algorithms needed to identify specific documents, meaning that as it stands operatives would have to search every email in the CMS to find the one they’re looking for.

The datacentre where intercepted data is to be stored is also apparently not yet ready, while the country’s Central Bureau of Investigation has yet to be given access to the system, causing further delays.

At a time when mass government monitoring of communications networks is a hot topic around the world thanks to Edward Snowden’s NSA revelations, rights groups have roundly slammed India’s CMS plans.

Human Rights Watch branded the scheme “chilling” in a strongly worded response, while India’s Centre for Internet and Society warned that the country currently doesn’t have privacy laws which could protect individuals from potential abuse of the system.

A Stop ICMS campaign has also been launched online in an attempt to mobilise opposition to the plans.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/theregister-uk-phil-muncaster-july-9-2013-indias-centralised-snooping-system-facing-big-delays

Is CMS a Compromise of Your Security?

praskrishna — 2013-07-15T06:27:05Z

By secretly monitoring and recording all Indians through a Central Monitoring System, our government will end up making citizens and businesses less safe.

This article appeared in the Forbes India magazine of 12 July, 2013. Sunil Abraham is quoted.

Are you reading this article on your PC or smartphone? No? Do you own a smartphone? Surely a phone then?

If you also happen to live in Delhi, Haryana or Karnataka, then from April this year nearly all your electronic communication—telephony, emails, VOIP, social networking—has been sucked up under an innocuous sounding programme called the Central Monitoring System, or CMS.

There’s no way to tell if you are being watched really, because telecom service providers aren’t part of the set-up. In most cases, they may not even be aware which of their users is being monitored. Neither can you approach a government agency or court to find out more, because there’s practically very little oversight or disclosure. What the government does with the data—how it is stored, secured, accessed or deleted—we don’t know.

Unlike the US and other Western democracies where even for a large scale programme like Prism (leaked recently by 29-year-old whistleblower and now fugitive Edward Snowden), surveillance orders need to be signed by a judge. But in India most orders are signed by either the Central or state home secretary, says Sunil Abraham, executive director for Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore. This leads to a conflict of interest as the executive branch is both undertaking law enforcement and providing oversight on its own work.

In most cases, the officials are overwhelmed with other work, and don’t have the time to apply their minds to each request. “There is supposed to be an oversight committee that reviews the decisions of home secretaries, but we don’t have any idea about that committee either,” says Abraham.

Meanwhile, government bodies like the R&AW, Central Bureau of Investigation, National Investigation Agency, Central Board of Direct Taxes, Narcotics Control Bureau and the Enforcement Directorate will have the right to look up your data. Starting next year, all mobile telephony operators will also need to track and store the geographical location from which subscribers make or receive calls.

“I see it as the rise of techno-determinism in our security apparatus. Previously, our philosophy was to avoid infringing on individual privacy, and monitor a small set of individuals directly suspected of engaging in illegal activities. Now, thanks to the Utopianism being offered up by ‘Big Data’ infrastructure, putting everybody under blanket surveillance seems like a better way to serve our security and law enforcement agendas more effectively,” says Abraham.

There is a real risk that CMS and the numerous other monitoring programmes that will subsequently connect to it will end up harming more Indians than protecting them.

The biggest risk is that these programmes will turn into lucrative ‘honey pots’ for hackers, criminals and rival countries. Why bother hacking individuals and companies if you can attack the CMS? We’ve seen private corporations and government agencies in the US, Israel and the UK getting hacked. So let’s not have any illusions that India is going to fare much better.

Another consequence is that sooner or later innocent citizens will be wrongly accused of being criminals based on mistaken data patterns. While searching for matches in any database with hundreds of millions of records, the risk of a ‘false positive’ increases disproportionately because there are exponentially more innocents than there are guilty. And in the near-Dystopian construct of the CMS, it will take months or years for such errors to be rectified.

As more Indians become aware of these programmes, they will adopt encryption and masking tools to hide their digital selves. In the process, numerous ‘unintended consequences’ of failing to differentiate law-abiding citizens from criminals will be created. What answer will a normal citizen offer to a law enforcement official who wants to know why he or she has encrypted all communications and hosted a personal server in, say, Sweden?

But arguably the biggest threat of 24x7 surveillance is to businesses. Security and trust are the foundations atop which most modern businesses are built. From your purchase of a gadget on an ecommerce site to a large conglomerate’s secret bid in a government auction to discussions within a company on future business strategies to patent applications—everything requires secrecy and security. All an unscrupulous competitor, whether it be a company or a country, has to do to go one-up on you is to attack the CMS and other central databases.

“The reason why the USA historically decided not to impose blanket surveillance wasn’t because of human rights, but to protect its businesses and intellectual property. Because while we may be able to live in a society without human rights, we cannot be in one without functional markets,” says Abraham.

He goes on to say that the recent disclosures around the various spying programmes run by the US have made the private surveillance and security industry very happy. “Each incident becomes a case-study to pit one country against another, forcing each one to cherry-pick the worst global practices in a dangerous race to the bottom. Civil society and privacy activists don’t have the resources to fight large vendors and so the only thing that will stop this is the leak of large databases, like that of 9 million Israeli biometric records a few years back.”

Recollecting the news about a family-business break-up some years ago, where two brothers agreed to split their businesses, the net result was one brother opted out of telephony services offered by the other. All of that is now moot. “There are no more shadows now. Nobody will have refuge and everybody will be exposed,” says Abraham.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/forbesindia-article-real-issue-july9-2013-rohin-dharmakumar-is-cms-a-compromise-of-your-security

Moving Towards a Surveillance State

atreya — 2013-07-15T05:57:15Z

The cyberspace is a modern construct of communication and today, a large part of human activity takes place in cyberspace. It has become the universal platform where business is executed, discourse is conducted and personal information is exchanged. However, the underbelly of the internet is also seen to host activities and persons who are motivated by nefarious intent.

Note: The original tender document of the Assam Police dated 28.02.2013 along with other several other tender documents for procurement of Internet and Voice Monitoring Systems is attached as a zip folder.

As highlighted in the International Principles on the Application of Human Rights to Communications Surveillance, logistical barriers to surveillance have decreased in recent decades and the application of legal principles in new technological contexts has become unclear. It is often feared that in light of the explosion of digital communications content and information about communications, or "communications metadata," coupled with the decreasing costs of storing and mining large sets of data and the provision of personal content through third party service providers make State surveillance possible at an unprecedented scale. Communications surveillance in the modern environment encompasses the monitoring, interception, collection, preservation and retention of, interference with, or access to information that includes, reflects, arises from or is about a person's communications in the past, present or future.[*] These fears are now turning into a reality with the introduction of mass surveillance systems which penetrate into the lives of every person who uses any form of communications. There is ample evidence in the form of tenders for Internet Monitoring Systems (IMS) and Telecom Interception Systems (TCIS) put out by the Central government and various state governments that the Indian state is steadily turning into an extensive surveillance state.

While surveillance and intelligence gathering is essential for the maintenance of national security, the creation and working of a mass surveillance system as it is envisioned today may not necessarily be in absolute conformity with the existing law. A mass surveillance system like the Central Monitoring System (CMS) not only threatens to completely eradicate any vestige of the right to privacy but in the absence of a concrete set of procedural guidelines creates a tremendous risk of abuse.

Although information regarding the Central Monitoring System is quite limited on the public forum at the moment it can be gathered that a centralized system for monitoring of all communication was first proposed by the Government of India in 2009 as indicated by the press release of the Ministry of Communications & Information. Implementation of the system started subsequently as indicated by another government press release and the Center for Development of Telematics (C-DOT) was entrusted with the responsibility of implementing the system. As per the C-DOT annual report 2011-12, research, development, trials and progressive scaling up of a Central Monitoring System were conducted by the organization in the past 4 years and the requisite hardware and CMS solutions which support voice and data interception have been installed and commissioned at various Telecom Service Providers (TSP) in Delhi and Haryana as part of the pilot project. Media reports indicate that the project will be fully functional by 2014. While an extensive surveillance system is being stealthily introduced by the state, several concerns with regard to its extent of use, functioning, and real world impact have been raised owing to ambiguities and wide gaps in procedure and law. Moreover, the lack of a concrete privacy legislation coupled with the absence of public discourse indicates the lack of interest of the state over the rights of an ordinary citizen. It is under these circumstances that awareness must first be brought regarding the risks of the mass surveillance on civil liberties which in the absence of established procedures protecting the rights of the citizens of the state can result in the abuse of powers by the state or its agencies and lead to the demise of civil freedoms even in democratic states.

The architecture and working of a proposed Internet Monitoring System must be examined in an attempt to better understand the functioning, capabilities and possible impact of a Central Monitoring System on our society and lives. This can perhaps allow more open discourse and a committed effort to preserve the rights of the citizens especially the right to privacy can be made while allowing for the creation of strong procedural guidelines which will help maintain legitimate intelligence gathering and surveillance.

Internet Monitoring System: Setup and Working
Very broadly, The Internet Monitoring System enables an agency of the state to intercept and monitor all content which passes through the Internet Service Provider’s (ISP) server which includes all electronic correspondence (emails, chats or IM’s, transcribed call logs), web forms, video and audio files, and other forms of internet content. The electronic data is stored and also subject to various types of analysis. While Internet Monitoring Systems are installed locally and their function is limited to specific geographic region, the Central Monitoring System will consolidate the data acquired from the different voice and data interception systems located across the country and create a centralized architecture for interception, monitoring and analysis of communications. Although the exact specifications and functions of the central monitoring system still remain unclear and ambiguous, some parallels regarding the functioning of the CMS can be drawn from the the specifications revealed in the Assam Police tender document for the procurement of an Internet Monitoring System.

Setup
The deployment architecture of an Internet Monitoring System (IMS) contains probe servers which are installed at the Internet Service Provider’s (ISP) premises and the probes are installed at various tapping points within the entire ISP network. A collection server is also installed and hosted at the site of the ISP. The collection server is used to either collect, analyze, filter or simple aggregate the data from the ISP servers and the data is transferred to a master aggregation server located a central data center. The central data center may also contain more servers specifically for analysis and storage. This type of architecture is being referred to as a ‘high availability clustered setup’ which is supposed to provide security in case of a failure or outage.

The Assam Police Internet Monitoring System tender document specifically indicates that the deployment in the state of Assam shall require 8 taps or probes to be installed at different ISPs, out of which 6 taps/probes shall be of 10 GBPS and 2 taps are of 1 GBPS. The document however mentions that the specifications are preliminary and subject to change.

Types of data
The proposed internet monitoring system of the Assam state can provide network traffic interception and a variety of internet protocols including Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), File Transfer Protocol (FTP), Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP), Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP) and Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) can be intercepted and monitored. The system can also support monitoring of Internet Relay Chat and various other messaging applications (such as Google Talk, Yahoo Chat, MSN Messenger, ICQ, etc.). The system can be equipped to capture and display multiple file types like text (.doc, .pdf), zipped (.zip) and executable applications (.exe). Further, information regarding login details, login pattern, login location, DNS address, routing address can be acquired along with the IP address and other details of the user.

Web crawling capabilities can be installed on the system which can provide data from various data sources like social networking sites, web based communities, wikis, blogs and other forms of web content. Social media websites (such as Twitter, Facebook, Orkut, MySpace etc.), web pages and data on hosted applications can also be intercepted, monitored and analyzed. The system also allows capture of additional pages if updated; log periodical updates and other changes. This allows the monitoring agencies the capability of gathering internet traffic based on several parameters like Protocols, Keywords, Filters and Watch lists. Keyword matching is achieved by including phonetically similar words in various languages including local languages.

More specific functions of the IMS can include complete email extraction which will disclose the address book, inbox, sent mail folder, drafts folder, personal folders, delete folders, custom folders etc. and can also provide identification of dead drop mails. The system can also be equipped to allow country wise tracking of instant messages, chats and mails.

Regarding retention and storage of data, the tender document specifies that the system shall be technically capable of retaining the metadata of Internet traffic for at least one year and the defined traffic/payload/content is to be retained in the storage server at least for a week. However, the data may be retained for a longer period if required. The metadata and qualified data after analysis are integrated to a designated main intelligence repository for storage.

Types of Analysis
The Internet Monitoring System apart from intercepting all the data generated through the Internet Service Providers is essentially equipped for various types of data analysis. The solutions that are installed in the internet monitoring system provide the capability for real time as well as historical analysis of network traffic, network perimeter devices and internal sniffers. The kinds of analysis based on ‘slicing and dicing of data’ range from text mining, sentiment analysis, link analysis, geo-spatial analysis, statistical analysis, social network analysis, transaction analysis, locational analysis and fusion based analysis, CDR analysis, timeline analysis and histogram based analysis from various sources.

The solutions installed in the IMS can enable monitoring of specific words or phrases (in various languages) in blogs, websites, forums, media reports, social media websites, media reports, chat rooms and messaging applications, collaboration applications and deep web applications. Phone numbers, addresses, names, locations, age, gender and other such information from content including comments and such can also be monitored. Specifically with regard to social media, the user’s profile and information related to it can be extracted and a detailed ontology of all the social media profiles of the user can be created.

Based on the information, the analysis supposed to provide the capability to identify suspicious behavior based on existing and new patterns as they emerge and are continuously applied to combine incoming and existing information on people, profiles, transactions, social network, type of websites visited, time spent on websites, type of content download or view and any other type of gatherable information. The solutions on the system are also supposed to create single or multiple or parallel scenario build-ups that may occur in blogs, social media forums, chat rooms, specific web hosting server locations or URL, packet route that may be defined from time to time and such scenario build-ups can be based on parameters like sentiments, language or expressions purporting hatred or anti-national expressions, and even emotions like expression of joy, compassion and anger, which as may be defined by the agency depending on operational and intelligence requirement. Based on these parameters, automated alerts can be generated relating to structured or unstructured data (including metadata of contents), events, pattern discovery, phonetically similar words or phrases or actions from users.

Based on the data analysis, reports or dossiers can be generated and visual analysis allowing a wide variety of views can be created. Further, real time visualization showing results from real-time data can be generated which allows alerts, alert categories or discoveries to be ranked (high, medium, and low priority, high value asset, low value asset, moderate value asset, verified information, unverified information, primary evidence, secondary evidence, circumstantial evidence, etc.) based on criteria developed by the agency. The IMS solutions can also be capable of offering web-intelligence and open source intelligence and allow capabilities like simultaneous search capabilities which can be automated providing a powerful tool for exploration of the intercepted data.

Another important requirement mentioned in the tender document is the systems capability to integrate with other interception and monitoring systems for 2G, 3G/UMTS and other evolving mobile carrier technologies including fixed line and Blackberry services and encrypted IP services like Skype services.

Conclusion
It is clear that a system like IMS with its extensive interception and analysis capabilities gives complete access to an agency or authority of all information that is accessed or transmitted by a person on the internet including information which is private and confidential such as email and instant messages. Although the state has the power to issue directions for interception or monitoring of information under the Information Technology Act, 2000 and certain rules are prescribed under section 69B, they are wholly inadequate compared to the scope and extent of the Internet Monitoring System and its scale of operations. The interception and monitoring systems that are either proposed or already in place effectively bypass the existing procedures prescribed under the Information Technology Act.

The issues, concerns and risks are only compounded when it comes to the Central Monitoring System. The solutions installed in present day interception and monitoring systems give the state unprecedented powers to intercept, monitor and analyze all the data of any person who access the internet. Tools like deep packet inspection and extensive data mining solutions in the absence of concrete safeguards and when deployed through a centralized system can be misused to censor any content including legitimate discourse. Also, the perception that access to a larger amount of data or all data can help improve intelligence can also be sometimes misleading and it must be asked whether the fundamental rights of the citizens of the state can be traded away under the pretext of national security. Furthermore, it is essential for the state to weigh the costs of such a project both economically and morally and balance it with sufficient internal measures as well as adequate laws so that the democratic values are persevered and not endangered by any act of reckless force.

Reiterating what has been said earlier, while it is important for the state to improve its intelligence gathering tools and mechanisms, it must not be done at the cost of a citizen’s fundamental right. It is the duty of the democratic state to endure and maintain a fine balance between national interest and fundamental rights through timely creation of equitable laws.

[*]. http://necessaryandproportionate.net/#_edn2

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/moving-towards-surveillance-state

RTI on Officials and Agencies Authorized to Intercept Telephone Messages in India

praskrishna — 2013-07-15T05:23:54Z

In an RTI mailed on April 17, 2013, the Centre for Internet and Society sought comprehensive information on the officials and agencies authorized to intercept telephone messages in India.

A portion of the RTI still awaits response, as it was redirected to the Department of Electronics and Information Technology. But on May 23, 2013 Rakesh Mittal of the Ministry of Home Affairs responded in brief and directed us to the 2007 Amendment to the 1885 Indian Telegraph Act.

Referring to rule 419-A of the amendment and the Ministry of Home Affairs website, we find that within central government the power to order communications surveillance is normally reserved for Union Home Secretary, a position held by Shir Anil Goswami as of June 30, 2013 (previously R.K. Singh). The amendment goes on to say, “In unavoidable circumstances,” however, such an order can be commanded by a Joint Secretary who has been authorized by Union Home Secretary Goswami. On the federal level, the Ministry of Home Affairs includes nearly 20 such Joint Secretaries able to be authorized for making interception commands.

A listing of the original question requests are given below:

Please provide a list containing name, rank and office address of the officers/agencies authorized by the Central Government to issue an order for interception under section 5(2) of the Telegraph Act, 1885
Please provide a list containing name, rank and office address of the officers authorized to issue interception orders under Rule 419A(1) of the Telegraph Rules, 1951 in unavoidable circumstances when such orders cannot be issued by the secretary to the Government of India, Ministry of Home Affairs.
Please provide a list containing the name, rank and office address of the officers/agencies designated as “competent authority” in terms of the Rule 419A(1) proviso of the Telegraph Rules, 1951.
Please provide a list of the agencies authorized by the Central Government to intercept, monitor, decrypt any information generated, transmitted, received or stored in any computer resource under section 69(1) of the Information Technology Act, 2000.
Please provide a list of the agencies authorized by the Central Government to monitor and collect traffic data or information generated, transmitted, received or stored in any computer resource under section 69-B of the Information Technology Act, 2000.
Please provide a list containing name, rank and office address of the officers/agencies authorized to issue interception orders under Rule 3, first proviso, of the Information Technology (Procedure and Safeguards for Interception, Monitoring and Decryption of Information) Rules, 2009.
Please provide a list of the agencies authorised to intercept, monitor, decrypt any information generated, transmitted, received or stored in any computer resource under Rule 4 of the Information Technology (Procedure and Safeguards for Interception, Monitoring, and Decryption of Information) Rules, 2009.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/resources/rti-on-officials-and-agencies-authorized-to-intercept-telephone-messages-in-india

India:Privacy in Peril

bhairav — 2013-09-25T09:56:22Z

The danger of mass surveillance in India is for real. The absence of a regulating law is damning for Indians who want to protect their privacy against the juggernaut of state and private surveillance.

The article was originally published in the Frontline on July 12, 2013.

At the concluding scene of his latest movie, Superman disdainfully flings a surveillance drone down to earth in front of a horrified general. “You can’t control me,” he tells his military minder. “You can’t find out where I hang up my cape.” This exchange goes to the crux of surveillance: control. Surveillance is the means by which nation-states exercise control over people. If the logical basis of the nation-state is the establishment and maintenance of homogeneity, it is necessary to detect and interdict dissent before it threatens the boundedness and continuity of the national imagination. This imagination often cannot encompass diversity, so it constructs categories of others that include dissenters and outsiders. Admittedly, this happens less in India because the foundation of the Indian nation-state imagined a diverse society expressing a plurality of ideas in a variety of languages secured by a syncretic and democratic government that protected individual freedoms. Unfortunately, this vision is still to be realised, and the foundational idea of India continues to be challenged by poor governance, poverty, insurgencies and rebellion. Consequently, surveillance is, for the modern nation-state, a condicio sine qua non—an essential element without which it will eventually cease to exist. The challenge for democratic nation-states is to find the optimal balance between surveillance and the duty to protect the freedoms of its citizens.

History of wiretaps

Some countries, such as the United States, have assembled a vast apparatus of surveillance to monitor the activities of their citizens and foreigners. Let us review the recent controversy revealed by the whistle-blower Edward Snowden. In 1967, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Katz vs United States that wiretaps had to be warranted, judicially sanctioned and supported by probable cause. This resulted in the passage of the Wiretap Act of 1968 that regulated domestic surveillance. Following revelations that Washington was engaging in unrestricted foreign surveillance in the context of the Vietnam war and anti-war protests, the U.S. Congress enacted the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) in 1978. FISA gave the U.S. government the power to conduct, without judicial sanction, surveillance for foreign intelligence information; and, with judicial sanction from a secret FISA court, surveillance of anybody if the ultimate target was a foreign power. Paradoxically, even a U.S. citizen could be a foreign power in certain circumstances. Domestically, FISA enabled secret warrants for specific items of information such as library book borrowers and car rentals.

Following the 9/11 World Trade Centre attacks, Congress enacted the Patriot Act of 2001, Section 215 of which dramatically expanded the scope of FISA to allow secret warrants to conduct surveillance in respect of “any tangible thing” that was relevant to a national security investigation. In exercise of this power, a secret FISA court issued secret warrants ordering a number of U.S. companies to share, in real time, voice and data traffic with the National Security Agency (NSA). We may never know the full scope of the NSA’s surveillance, but we know this: (a) Verizon Communications, a telecommunications major, was ordered to provide metadata for all telephone calls within and without the U.S.; (b) the NSA runs a clandestine programme called PRISM that accesses Internet traffic, such as e-mails, web searches, forum comments and blogs, in real time; and (c) the NSA manages a comprehensive data analysis system called Boundless Informant that intercepts and analyses voice and data traffic around the world and subjects them to automated pattern recognition. The documents leaked by Snowden allege that Google, Facebook, Apple, Dropbox, Microsoft and Yahoo! participate in PRISM, but these companies have denied their involvement.

India fifth-most monitored

How does this affect India? The Snowden documents reveal that India is the NSA’s fifth-most monitored country after Iran, Pakistan, Jordan and Egypt. Interestingly, China is monitored less than India. Several billion pieces of data from India, such as e-mails and telephone metadata, were intercepted and monitored by the NSA. For Indians, it is not inconceivable that our e-mails, should they be sent using Gmail, Yahoo! Mail or Hotmail, or our documents, should we be subscribing to Dropbox, or our Facebook posts, are being accessed and read by the NSA. Incredibly, most Indian governmental communication, including that of Ministers and senior civil servants, use private U.S. e-mail services. We no longer enjoy privacy online. The question of suspicious activity, irrespective of the rubric under which suspicion is measured, is moot. Any use of U.S. service providers is potentially compromised since U.S. law permits intrusive dragnet surveillance against foreigners. This clearly reveals a dichotomy in U.S. constitutional law: the Fourth Amendment’s guarantees of privacy, repeatedly upheld by U.S. courts, protect U.S. citizens to a far greater extent than they do foreigners. It is natural for a nation-state to privilege the rights of its citizens over others. As Indians, therefore, we must clearly look out for ourselves.

Privacy and personal liberty

Unfortunately, India does not have a persuasive jurisprudence of privacy protection. In the Kharak Singh (1964) and Gobind (1975) cases, the Supreme Court of India considered the question of privacy from physical surveillance by the police in and around homes of suspects. In the latter case, the court found that some of the Fundamental Rights “could be described as contributing to the right to privacy”, which was subject to a compelling public interest. This insipid inference held the field until 1994 when, in the Rajagopal (“Auto Shankar”, 1994) case, the Supreme Court, for the first time, directly located privacy within the ambit of the right to personal liberty recognised by Article 21 of the Constitution. However, Rajagopal dealt specifically with the publication of an autobiography, it did not consider the privacy of communications. In 1997, the Supreme Court considered the question of wiretaps in the People’s Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL) case. While finding that wiretaps invaded the privacy of communications, it continued to permit them subject to some procedural safeguards which continue to be routinely ignored. A more robust statement of the right to privacy was made by the Delhi High Court in the Naz Foundation case (2011) that decriminalised consensual homosexual acts; however, there is an appeal against the judgment in the Supreme Court.

Legislative silence

Judicial vagueness has been compounded by legislative silence. India does not have a law to operationalise a right to privacy. Consequently, a multitude of laws permit daily infractions of privacy. These infractions have survived because they are diverse, dissipated and quite disorganised. However, the technocratic impulse to centralise and consolidate surveillance and data collection has, in recent years, alarmed many citizens. The state hopes to, through enterprises such as the Central Monitoring System (CMS), the Crime and Criminals Tracking Network and System (CCTNS), the National Intelligence Grid (NATGRID), the Telephone Call Interception System (TCIS) and the Unique Identification Number (UID), replicate the U.S. successes in surveillance and monitoring and profiling all its citizens. However, unlike the U.S., India proposes to achieve this without an enabling law. Let us consider the CMS. No documents have been made available that indicate the scope and size of the CMS.

From a variety of police tenders for private equipment, it appears that the Central government hopes to put in place a system that will intercept, in real time, all voice and data traffic originating or terminating in India or being carried by Indian service providers. This data will be subject to pattern recognition and other automated tests to detect emotional markers, such as hate, compassion or intent. The sheer scale of this enterprise is intimidating; all communications in India’s many languages will be subject to interception and testing designed to detect different forms of dissent. This mammoth exercise in monitoring is taking place—it is understood that some components of the CMS are already operational—without statutory sanction. No credible authorities exist to supervise this exercise, no avenues for redress have been identified and no consequences have been laid down for abuse.

Statutory Surveillance

In a recent interview, Milind Deora, Minister of State for Communications and Information Technology, dismissed public scepticism of the CMS saying that direct state access to private communications was better for privacy since it reduced dependence on the interception abilities of private service providers. This circular argument is both disingenuous and incorrect. No doubt, trusting private persons with the power to intercept and store the private data of citizens is flawed. The leaking of the Niira Radia tapes, which contain the private communications of Niira Radia taped on the orders of the Income Tax Department, testifies to this flaw. However, bypassing private players to enable direct state access to private communications will preclude leaks and, thereby, remove from public knowledge the fact of surveillance. This messy situation may be obviated by a regime of statutory regulation of warranted surveillance by an independent and impartial authority. This system is favoured by liberal democracies around the world but conspicuously resisted by the Indian government.

The question of privacy legislation was recently considered by a committee chaired by Justice Ajit Prakash Shah, a former judge of the Delhi High Court who sat on the Bench that delivered the Naz Foundation judgment. The Shah Committee was constituted by the Planning Commission for a different reason: the need to protect personal data that are outsourced to India for processing. The lack of credible privacy law, it is foreseen, will result in European and other foreign personal data being sent to other attractive processing destinations, such as Vietnam, Israel or the Philippines, resulting in the decline of India’s outsourcing industry. However, the Shah Committee also noted the absence of law sufficient to protect against surveillance abuses. Most importantly, the Shah Committee formulated nine national privacy principles to inform any future privacy legislation (see story on page 26). In 2011, the Department of Personnel and Training (DoPT) of the Ministry of Human Resource Development, the same Ministry entrusted with implementing the Right to Information Act, 2005, leaked a draft privacy Bill, marked ‘Secret’, on the Internet. The DoPT Bill received substantive criticism from the Attorney General and some government Secretaries for the clumsy drafting. A new version of the DoPT Bill is reported to have been drafted and sent to the Ministry of Law for consideration. This revised Bill, which presumably contains chapters to regulate surveillance, including the interception of communications, has not been made public.

The need for privacy legislation cannot be overstated. The Snowden affair reveals the extent of possible state surveillance of private communications. For Indians who must now explore ways to protect their privacy against the juggernaut of state and private surveillance, the absence of regulatory law is damning. Permitting, through public inaction, unwarranted and non-targetted dragnet surveillance by the Indian state without reasonable cause would be an act of surrender of far-reaching implications.

Information, they say, is power. Allowing governments to exercise this power over us without thought for the rule of law constitutes the ultimate submission possible in a democratic nation-state. And, since superheroes are escapist fantasies, without the prospect of good laws we will all be subordinate to a new national imagination of control and monitoring, surveillance and profiling. If allowed to come to pass, this will be a betrayal of the foundational idea of India as a free and democratic republic tolerant of dissent.

Bhairav Acharya is a constitutional lawyer practising in the Supreme Court of India. He advises the Centre for Internet & Society, Bangalore, on privacy law and other constitutional issues.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/frontline-cover-story-july-12-2013-bhairav-acharya-privacy-in-peril

CIS Cybersecurity Series (Part 5) - Amelia Andersdotter

purba — 2013-08-01T09:54:14Z

CIS interviews Amelia Andersdotter, member of the European parliament, as part of the Cybersecurity Series

"Normally a good security policy will also provide privacy to the citizen that is encompassed by the security policy. So things like encryption, for instance, bring a more secure communication, more private communication, where you are able to interact with other people on equal terms and you don't have to fear outside interference. And that is obviously good for both the individual and for security. But then of course, security policies can be framed in different ways. It depends on who you are trying to protect with the security policy. Are you trying to create a secure situation for a copyright holder, or are you trying to create a secure situation for a law enforcement officer, or for a private citizen?" - Amelia Andersdotter, member of European parliament.

Centre for Internet and Society presents its fifth installment of the CIS Cybersecurity Series.

The CIS Cybersecurity Series seeks to address hotly debated aspects of cybersecurity and hopes to encourage wider public discourse around the topic.

Amelia Andersdotter is a Member of the European Parliament for the Pirate Party in Sweden. She works with industrial policy in the parliamentary committee of Industry, Research and Energy and is a substitute member of the committees for international trade, INTA, and budget control, CONT. Amelia is the Patron of the European Parliament Free Software User Group (EPFSUG), and also works in the delegations for the Andean community and Korean peninsula.

Amelia's website is: http://ameliaandersdotter.eu/

This work was carried out as part of the Cyber Stewards Network with aid of a grant from the International Development Research Centre, Ottawa, Canada.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/cis-cybersecurity-series-part-5-amelia-andersdotter