A government panel has said that services like Gmail, BlackBerry and Nokia?s email services should not be banned because they cannot be monitored.
It has proposed that in the short term, India should ask operators offering such services to either locate servers in the country or share encryption keys with security agencies and assist security agencies here in monitoring these services.
As a long-term solution, the committee has recommended that the upcoming central monitoring system (CMS) be made capable of intercepting any form of communication service offered within the country. It has also endorsed the Department of Telecommunications? (DoT) stance that the final solution should involve intelligence agencies building up capabilities indigenously to monitor and intercept these technologies.
The panel added that security agencies should ask companies like Infosys, TCS, Wipro and Tech Mahindra to build such capabilities. It has said security agencies must first check whether monitoring solutions are available in other counties before threatening to ban any specific communication service.
The panel?s report stated, “Before banning or blocking of encrypted communication, the impact on business and industry, e-commerce, e-governance, e-medicine, e-health, passport services etc should be taken into consideration. Further, banning or blocking services without providing an alternative may have international reactions and could affect other Indian industries such as BPO and IT outsourcing.?
The committee has also recommended that India raise its encryption levels from 40 bits to 256 bits-the standard in Europe and the US.
However, the Ministry of Home Affairs and intelligence bureaus have not signed these recommendations and have expressed dissent. The intelligence bureau has said the panel?s recommendation shifts the onus on encryption and decryption from mobile phone companies to the designated agency authorised by the home ministry, when the current experience was that government agencies were unable to track such services.
It has also pointed out that it may be impossible to persuade foreign players to locate servers in India or share encryption keys with security agencies here as recommended by the panel. The intelligence bureau has also said the recommendations must make it mandatory for mobile phone and internet companies to have technologies to block services that are non-decodeable by security agencies.
