We missed this earlier. The Government’s Central Monitoring System (CMS) is already live in Delhi, New Delhi and Mumbai, according to Minister for Communications & IT, Ravi Shankar Prasad. Answering a query on 4 May, Prasad told the Lok Sabha that CMS will be set up in a phased manner to “automate the process of lawful interception and monitoring of mobile phones, landlines and the internet in the country.” He added that the technology development and pilot trials have already been completed, and the Centre Monitoring Centre (CMC) at Delhi, Regional Monitoring Center (RMC) at New Delhi and Mumbai have been operationalised, without giving a timeline. In December last year, Prasad said that CMS was expected to be launched by March 2016, and would be progressively operationalised. But it seems that the government has already conducted its pilot. For more details on CMS read: Indian Government Plans Digital Central Monitoring System. From the archives: Moving Towards A Surveillance State – CIS India Prasad elaborated on the aims and objective of CMS: - Electronic provisioning of phone numbers by government agencies without manual intervention from Telecom Service Providers (TSPs) on a secure network. - Secure flow of intercepted communication in near real time between law enforcement and TSPs on a secure and dedicated CMS network. - Central and regional centres to help Centre and State law enforcement in lawful interception and monitoring with respect to national security and allied matters. - Research and development in fields related to CMS for continuous…
