Earful of trouble

The telephone tapping issue has snowballed into a political controversy, with allegations and counter-allegations swirling around, and the real matter relegated to the backburner.

The telephone tapping issue has snowballed into a political controversy, with allegations and counter-allegations swirling around, and the real matter relegated to the backburner. This is an issue of personal privacy and the way it was breached. Samajwadi Party leader Amar Singh’s residence landline connection through a private service provider was found to have been tapped, apparently on the basis of forged documents. That these documents purported to be from senior Delhi government officials suggest that such activities are routine. The question then is whether this is being done within the Supreme Court’s 1996 guidelines. These accept the need for phone taps, but emphasise that it must be done, first, with the written permission of the Union home secretary or his counterparts in the states and second, the interception cannot be open-ended and must be for brief periods not exceeding six months. Third, that a high-level review committee examine the results of each and every interception before permitting an extension.

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According to reports, one problem that companies, private, and presumably the PSUs, face is that of ‘informal’ requests, mainly from police officers, amounting to 20-30 a day in New Delhi alone, to tap phones. This would most certainly violate the guidelines, and would account for the climate of laxity in which Bhupendra Kumar, the private detective, could approach a low-level official of the phone company and tap Mr Singh’s phone line. However, CPI(M) general secretary Prakash Karat’s finger-pointing at the policy of allowing foreign companies into the telecom sector, is a non-sequitur. After all, this phone tap was by Indians, purporting to have official permission, and conducted by an Indian phone company. But it does beg the question: if the apex court guidelines demand that permission must come from someone as high-up as the Union home secretary, do the companies monitor compliance by a person of sufficiently high rank?

Governments will always argue that they need to tap phones to preempt terrorism and crimes. There is some merit to the argument, but that is why guidelines exist. There is no reason to believe that legitimate requests will be refused. The government and the phone companies need to take a hard look at the issue to reassure the phone users that their privacy is not being vicariously violated.