The Central Monitoring System (CMS), India’s phone tapping mechanism that will allow law enforcement agencies (LEAs) access to various phone operators from under one roof, will start with curtailed capacity as the Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd (BSNL) has failed to augment its “legacy switches” with modern switches, which in turn will affect investigation and intelligence gathering work of various agencies.
“The LEAs will not be able to utilise optimum capacity of the CMS from the very first day, despite having spent crores on the development of the system based on the U.S.’ ‘Prism’ project. The BSNL was supposed to provide modern switches with the capacity to simultaneously monitor 5,000 calls, but it has failed to upgrade its system and will provide tapping capacity of just 1,500 calls,” a senior government officer engaged in the project told The Hindu .
An internal note of the DoT also points towards this flaw and asks the BSNL to upgrade its system as desired by the Intelligence Bureau. “IB intimated that the target capacity of BSNL to provision in their ILD (or legacy) switch simultaneously is still 1,500 calls against the requirement of 5,000 mandated (by DoT)…As number of targets are more than the capacity, all targets are not getting provisioned which poses limitation in collecting requisite intelligence,” the note says.
Significantly, as the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) gears to launch the Rs. 400-crore project early next year, which will still be at least one year behind schedule, the very base of the project is far from ready. It is learnt that despite making the BSNL the pivot of the project, no thought was given to upgrading hardware and software of the government-run telecom company. “Now the BSNL has informed the DoT and the MHA that it was negotiating with various vendors for upgrading its infrastructure, but still it would not be able to reach the desired capacity,” the official noted.
The internal note, prepared on latest inter-department meeting on the issue, says: “BSNL intimated that they have the legacy switches installed in the network which have the issues in enhancing the interception and monitoring capacity of concurrent targets from 1,500 to 5,000…BSNL intimated that in past they had some discussion with switch vendors wherein vendors informed that it is technically possible to enhance the capacity up to 3,000 numbers but not up to 5,000.”
“However, the capacity of 5,000 can be achieved only after the replacement of legacy switches which is in consideration of BSNL and likely to be completed by 2014-15…IB expressed that BSNL should take all possible efforts to enhance the capacity at least up to 3,000 calls till the replacement of existing switches takes place which was agreed by the BSNL,” the note adds.
The CMS will give nine intelligence and investigating agencies such as the IB, Research and Analyses Wing, Central Bureau of Investigation, and state intelligence agencies phone tapping capabilities sans any manual intervention from telecom service providers on a secured network, thus enhancing the secrecy level and quick provisioning of target. Interception through CMS will be instant as compared to the existing system which takes a very long time, while it will also allow analysis of call data records to help in establishing linkage between anti-social/anti-national elements.
