Your phone will give away all your secrets

The government is setting up phone monitoring systems across the country that can not only listen to your phone conversation, but can also track down your precise location on a map and match your voice with known suspects before you complete the call. Aloke Tikku reports.

The government is setting up phone monitoring systems across the country that can not only listen to your phone conversation, but can also track down your precise location on a map and match your voice with known suspects before you complete the call.

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The system, to be set up by next April, will also be able to analyse the calling pattern of a target to identify correlated calls and record the locations of all mobile devices.

It will also have the capability to integrate the data on a digital map — including satellite imagery and software — that can analyse millions of calls and their locations and spot the possible hideouts being used by a suspect.

An integrated voice recognition system will enable intelligence officers to identify the voices of people the target is talking to.

The Centre is going to spend a sum of Rs 450 crore to set up the standardised interception facilities in Delhi and all the state capitals.

Although the hardware can be imported, the home ministry has made it clear that the software will have to be developed indigenously.

So far, telecom companies have been asked to provide facilities by security establishments. But the facilities are of varying capabilities often dependent on demands made by the state police and the ability of the telecom service provider.

"The system across all the states need to be compatible and interoperable,” a tender document floated last week by the home ministry for the Intelligence Bureau’s centralised monitoring system said.

The monitoring stations at the states — 30 states will be covered in the first phase — will be linked to the central system in Delhi to enable them to transfer any terror-related information.

The lack of interoperability —that prevents a set of information from one system being read by another — has been a major challenge in setting up India’s national intelligence grid.

Once the new system is in place, home ministry officials said, it would make unauthorised access to any intercepted communication or records virtually impossible. Access to the system will be provided on the basis of biometric or other security cards.