Monitoring of internet gateways necessary: Security agencies

The government of India is taking this course after an email was received by some media houses serial blasts in Uttar Pradesh that left over a dozen people dead and scores others injured.

The email account, sent from Yahoo service provider using a French domain (fr), was created a day before the blasts by suspected terrorists whose apparent aim was not to expose the actual perpetrators of the crime.

According to sources,the monitoring of network would help the probe and intelligence agencies in gathering real-time information and take necessary preventive measures.

Voice over Internet Protocol (VOIP), used to transmit voice signals as data packets through the internet, was being misused by some people, posing a serious threat to national security, an internal paper sent to the Government said.

"The calling person in a foreign country makes a call through calling cards. Once he or she calls any number to India using calling cards, the call is routed through VOIP gateway in the foreign country where the voice signals are converted into data packets.

The same are transmitted over Internet and are converted into voice signals by VOIP gateway in India. The calls are further routed through a local telephone network to the destination as local calls," the paper said.

"Also, as the calls cannot be monitored by law enforcement agencies, they present a serious threat to the security of the nation," the paper said while referring to the case registered by the CBI against Reliance Infocomm (before demerger).

The paper, while calling for strengthening of the IT Act, also favoured legal sanctions for pre-registration of evidence collection tools as e-surveillance and undercover operations besides providing testimonial immunity to undercover agents.

The sources said various security agencies were also in favour of an undertaking by various network service providers to provide instant access to their hard disks as and when required by the investigating or intelligence agencies.

In the present case, the security agencies had to put in a request after which the case was sent to the registered office of the service provider which is based either in the US or some European country thus taking a lot of time.

As a result of this, various cyber crimes relating to terrorism fell flat, they added. - DDNEWS