- India has launched a wide-ranging surveillance programme that will give its security agencies and even income tax officials the ability to tap directly into e-mails and phone calls without oversight by courts or parliament.
- The expanded surveillance in the world's most populous democracy, which the government says will help safeguard national security, has alarmed privacy advocates at a time when allegations of massive US digital snooping beyond American shores have set off a global furore.
CENTRAL MONITORING
SYSTEM (CMS):
- The Central Monitoring System (CMS) was announced in 2011. The government started to quietly roll the system out state by state in April this year.
- The new system will allow the government to listen to and tape phone conversations, read e-mails and text messages, monitor posts on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn and track searches on Google of selected targets.
- Eventually, it will be able to target over 900 million landline and mobile phone subscribers and 120 million Internet users.
- The top bureaucrat in the Home Ministry and his state-level deputies will have the power to approve requests for surveillance of specific phone numbers, e-mails or social media accounts
- India does not have a formal privacy law and the new surveillance system will operate under the Indian Telegraph Act - a law formulated by the British in 1885 - which gives the government freedom to monitor private conversations. Monitoring of telephones and the Internet are part of the surveillance.
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