India to set up automatic monitoring of communications

[douglas9]

India plans to set up a centralized system to monitor communications on mobile phones, landlines and the Internet in the country, a minister told the Rajya Sabha, the upper house of Parliament, on Thursday.

Indian laws allow the interception and monitoring of communications under certain conditions, including to counter terrorism.

A pilot of the new Centralized Monitoring System (CMS) is to be started by June next year, subject to clearances by other government agencies, Gurudas Kamat, Minister of State for Communications and Information Technology told the Rajya Sabha, according to an announcement by the government's Press Information Bureau.

The CMS will have central and regional databases to help central and state-level enforcement agencies intercept and monitor communications, the government said. It will also have direct electronic provisioning of target numbers by government agencies without any intervention from telecom service providers, it added. It will also feature analysis of call data records and data mining of these records to identify call details, location details, and other information of the target numbers.

http://www.goodgearguide.com.au/article/327850

[pipoman]

1. They are going to be quite busy with all of those calls from angry and confused

US callers about electronic, appliance, and cell phone billing issues..

[Fumesucker]

2. We've had it here for a long time..

Note all the intercepted 9/11 pager messages posted the other day by from what appears to be a totally private organization.

I've been assuming all my electronic communications were being intercepted for at least two decades.

[Tesha]

3. You can certainly assume that "the traffic" is being monitored.

Modern telephone networks (both fixed and mobile) are certainly keeping records
of every call you make, keeping both the number that you called and the duration
of the call; the "details" portion of your cell phone bill proves this for mobile phones
and for your landline, unless you're somehow still connected by the last non-
computerized phone switch in America, all your calls there are being logged as
well.

(The non-computerized switches used not bother with "local" calls because
you often weren't billed separately for those, but a "pen recorder" could
always be attached to your phone line when an authority requested it.)

Tesha