New Delhi, June 20
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, several sources said.

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.

The Central Monitoring System (CMS) was announced in 2011 but there has been no public debate and the government has said little about how it will work or how it will ensure that the system is not abused. The government started to quietly roll the system out state by state in April this year, according to government officials.

Eventually, it will be able to target over 900 million landline and mobile phone subscribers and 120 million Internet users. Home Ministry spokesman KS Dhatwalia said he did not have details of CMS and therefore could not comment on the privacy concerns. A spokeswoman for the Telecommunications Ministry, which will oversee CMS, did not respond to queries. Indian officials said making details of the project public would limit its effectiveness as a clandestine intelligence-gathering tool. "Security of the country is very important. All countries have these surveillance programmes," said a senior Telecommunications Ministry official, defending the need for a large-scale eavesdropping system like CMS. 

"You can see terrorists getting caught, you see crimes being stopped. You need surveillance. This is to protect you and your country," said the official, who is directly involved in setting up the project. He did not want to be identified because of the sensitivity of the subject. 

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.

In 2012, India sent in 4,750 requests to Google Inc for user data, the highest in the world after the United States. Security agencies will no longer need to seek a court order for surveillance or depend, as they do now, on the Internet or telephone service providers to give them the data, government officials said. 

Government intercept data servers are being built on the premises of private telecommunications firms. These will allow the government to tap into communications at will without telling the service providers, said officials. 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, the government officials said. 

"Bypassing courts is really very dangerous and can be easily misused," said Pawan Sinha, who teaches human rights at Delhi University. In most countries in Europe and in the United States, security agencies were obliged to seek court approval or had to function with legal oversight, he said. The senior telecommunications ministry official dismissed suggestions that India's system could be open to abuse. 

"The Home Secretary has to have some substantial intelligence input to approve any kind of call tapping or call monitoring. He is not going to randomly decide to tape anybody's phone calls," he said. Nine government agencies will be authorised to make intercept requests, including the Central Bureau of Investigation and the Intelligence Bureau (IB), and the Income Tax Department. 

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. Minister of State, Information Technology, Milind Deora, said the new data collection system would actually improve citizens' privacy because telecommunications companies would no longer be directly involved in the surveillance - only government officials would. — Reuters