Later today, as the deadline runs out at 1600hrs IST, India's Ministry of Home Affairs will stop accepting proposals for a technology deployment that will operationalize a rather worrying project: the interception of all telephonic and mobile data communication in India. As we've pointed out earlier, there appears to be an increasing focus from the Indian government on three things: monitoring, identification, and the power to restrict/block (we call this the Troika of Paranoia). Download the tender document, from the MHA's website, here. The deployment will be across 30 locations all over India, in each state and Union Territory. Here is what the Indian government wants the "Communications Monitoring facility" to be technically capable of tracking: - Telecom Operators covered: All existing operators for GSM, CDMA & PSTN will be included in network for monitoring, across all circles and states. The system needs to be capable of monitoring: of Voice Calls, SMS & MMS, GPRS and FAX communications on Landlines (PSTN), CDMA and GSM networks. This includes Video Calls. - Calls: The system should be able to monitor all Call Content (CC) and Caller intercept Related Information (CRI) in real‐time as well as in off‐line monitoring for full duration of the call. The information stored includes Calling Number, Called Number, Start Date & Time, End Date & Time, Duration, IMEI (Calling No. & Called No.), IMSI (Calling No. & Called No.), Complete Cell ID (Calling No. & Called No.) with Latitude and Longitude, DTMF digits dialled during the call, Type of Call (Voice/FAX/SMS)], 3G calls…
