RE: [iwar] India's attempts to monitor emails
From: Ozair
From: ozair_rasheed@geocities.com
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From: "Ozair"
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Date: Tue, 13 Feb 2001 23:40:23 +0500
Reply-To: iwar@yahoogroups.com
Subject: RE: [iwar] India's attempts to monitor emails
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Interesting!!! We all know that the sites mentioned in the article were not
found to be so dangerous as claimed in the article. However, it is a good
attempt to highlight the effective (in a negative sense) use of such low
tech tool as e-mail.
I do not think that there are any secrets any longer, the only thing that
really matters is the speed at which the operation is carried out.
Regards,
Ozair
-----Original Message-----
From: r_v_p@yahoo.com [mailto:r_v_p@yahoo.com]
Sent: Tuesday, February 13, 2001 4:24 PM
To: iwar@yahoogroups.com
Subject: [iwar] India's attempts to monitor emails
Published in The Telegraph, Calcutta, on Monday, 05 February 2001,
Edit Page
http://www.telegraphindia.com
By Ravi Visvesvaraya Sharada Prasad
According to Delhi's police, the Lashkar-e-Taiba militants
responsible for the Red Fort attack were using electronic mail to
receive instructions from abroad. Since they were not able to
intercept and decipher these messages, our security agencies
reiterated their long-standing demand that India's entire e-mail
traffic should be monitored at the servers of internet service
providers (ISPs). They cited the instance when a member of Harkat Al
Ansar, Khalid Ibrahim, tried to obtain classified information about
India's nuclear programme immediately after the Pokhran-II blasts. He
used several Hotmail accounts from numerous cybercafés, but could be
detected only because Videsh Sanchar Nigam (VSNL) was India's sole
ISP then, and the IP addresses allocated to him could be correlated.
Today, he would be able to avoid detection because there are over 300
ISPs in India. Moreover, he can now use strong-encryption email
services like HushMail and ZipLip, which cannot be decrypted easily
even by USA's National Security Agency.
Intercepting emails of suspected terrorists and criminals, without
infringing on fundamental rights of law-abiding citizens, is
problematical. Several so-called democracies recently passed laws
which grant them sweeping powers to intercept emails of large
sections of their populace. Their security agencies are worried about
USA's lifting of export controls on strong cryptographic programmes;
the ready availability of Freenet as well as of the cryptographic
algorithms Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) and Rivest-Shamir-Adelman (RSA);
and the emergence of free email services using strong cryptography
such as HushMail and ZipLip.
A proponent of individual liberty, 23-year old Ian Clarke, recently
developed Freenet for his undergraduate thesis at the University of
Edinburgh. He has already distributed 35,000 copies worldwide, free
of charge. Clarke explained: "I developed Freenet so that people
under oppressive regimes can describe their plight without
retribution. Freenet provides complete anonymity and confidentiality
both for those transmitting information and those reading it. It is
virtually impossible for anyone to destroy or forcibly remove a
particular piece of information, or find out who is reading it, or
who wrote it in the first place, making censorship impossible."
Keith Akerman, Britain's chief police officer handling computer
crimes, attacked Clarke: "Freenet will be misused by criminals,
terrorists and pedophiles, with no risk of getting caught. While I'm
all for freedom of speech, Freenet will severely impede our ability
to investigate crimes."
Governments are attempting both technological and legal measures to
counter the likes of Freenet, HushMail, and ZipLip. Australia
recently passed the Telecommunications (Interception) Legislation
Amendment Act which grants the Australian Security Intelligence
Organization and other law enforcement agencies "the power to order
internet service providers, telecommunications service providers,
computer hardware and software vendors, and telecommunications
equipment vendors to provide all possible assistance in order to gain
access to any remote or networked computer if there are reasonable
grounds for believing that data held in the target computer will
substantially assist the collection of intelligence important to
national security." ASIO and other security agencies are "permitted
to copy, add, delete or alter any data in the target computer that is
relevant to the security matter" and will not be subject to the
Australian Crimes Act, which forbids computer hacking.
Britain's Parliament passed the Regulation of Investigatory Powers
Act, which forces ISPs to provide complete information about all
their subscribers to security agencies. At their cost, all ISPs are
required to install surveillance equipment which is hardwired to MI5,
Britain's intelligence agency. This permits MI5 to monitor, in real-
time, each and every email, website visited, and banking and e-
commerce transaction. Subscribers who refuse to reveal their
encryption keys face a two-year jail sentence.
A few months ago it was discovered that USA's Federal Bureau of
Investigation had been covertly using a surveillance system named
Carnivore. It is rack-mounted at the ISP's server and uses a high-
speed packet sniffer which intercepts and records every single e-mail
message. Even though FBI claimed that it would use Carnivore only
against specific persons after obtaining judicial warrants, it was
found that Carnivore actually recorded every email of each subscriber
of the ISP. US ISPs complied with FBI's orders to install Carnivore
and did not inform their subscribers that all their emails were being
recorded.
Our security agencies have been insisting that India enact laws
similar to those of Britain and Australia. In the Information
Technology Bill, they had introduced clause 73 which would have
required cybercafés to maintain lists of all websites that their
customers visited. However, in May 2000, MPs across the political
spectrum assailed this clause as a violation of fundamental rights,
and both the Lok Sabha and the Rajya Sabha rejected this attempt to
turn India into a police state. In addition to being a violation of
fundamental rights, clause 73 would have been unenforceable, being
akin to requiring every public phone booth to maintain a register of
all callers, called parties, and transcripts of entire conversations.
Undeterred by the defeat in Parliament, our security agencies then
drafted several provisions in the "Guidelines For Setting Up Of
Submarine Cable Landing Stations For International Gateways For
Internet" issued by the Department of Telecommunications in August
2000, which did not require parliamentary approval.
25) On-line and off-line (capture, store and retrieve) monitoring of
all classes of traffic (Internet, video, audio etc.) specified by
various attributes viz. destination, recipient, sender, key words
etc.
27) Agencies authorized by the Government should be able to monitor
all types of traffic passed through the landing terminals, including
data, FAX, speech, video and Multimedia etc., both in interactive and
non-interactive modes.
28) The monitoring should be possible on the basis of key words/key
expressions/addresses (IP address or e-mail address) of initiating or
terminating subscribers.
29) It should be possible to scan through entire traffic passing
through the gateway and filter the traffic as per the key words/key
expressions and addresses defined by the security agencies. Filtered
traffic should be stored in the memory/directory provided for the
security agencies…The filtered information must be decoded and stored
in such a way that direct hard copy of FAX and data or audio/video
tapes of the speech/video recording could be produced…
33) It should be possible to monitor the same traffic by more than
one security agency simultaneously. However, no agency should know
the traffic being monitored by other agencies.
14) The ISP licensee shall make available all the billing details of
any subscriber on demand by Telecom Authority.
15) The ISP licensee shall block Internet sites and individual
subscribers, as identified by Telecom Authority.
While India certainly is a target of several terrorist organizations,
such clauses are a violation of fundamental rights since they demand
that every incoming and outgoing message of every internet user
located in India should be intercepted and recorded permanently.
Keeping in view the guidelines issued a few years ago by the Supreme
Court regarding phone tapping, Draconian measures such as these
should be permitted only against a specific person and only after
obtaining a warrant from a High Court judge.
VSNL recently blocked the emails of a prominent scholar of Middle
Eastern affairs, Seema Kazi of Delhi. When she discovered that she
was under surveillance and complained to VSNL, a senior official told
her that Muslims indulged in anti-national activities and had
contacts with Pakistan. VSNL said that they had received complaints
that she was a security risk but refused to provide her details.
In addition to the human rights aspect, India's emergence as a global
power in information technology and electronic commerce would be
seriously jeopardized by the impractical and costly measures proposed
by our security agencies. To record every incoming and outgoing email
and website visited by each Indian resident, each landing station
would have to install about a million 20-gigabyte hard disks every
day, each of which costs about Rs 8,000. It is obvious why no ISP has
come forth to establish a landing station.
We should take heed of the protests of British industry against the
RIP Act. William Roebuck of E-Center, Britain's electronic commerce
association, warned: "British companies will no longer utilize e-
commerce. They will move as much of their businesses offshore as they
possibly can." Both the London School of Economics and the British
Chambers of Commerce estimated that the RIP Act would cost Britain 45
to 50 billion pounds over the next five years.
By Ravi Visvesvaraya Sharada Prasad
Published in The Telegraph, Calcutta, on Monday, 05 February 2001,
Edit Page
http://www.telegraphindia.com
============================================================
Ravi Visvesvaraya Sharada Prasad
rvp@lycos.com, rvp@excite.com, rvp@india.com
Faxes : {91} [11] 526-6868, {91} [11] 567-6386
Phone : {91} [11] 526-5439
Mail :
Ravi Visvesvaraya Sharada Prasad
19, Maitri Apts,
A - 3 Paschim Vihar,
New Delhi, 110 063
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