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Phone tapping issues

The controversy over the tapping of the telephone of the Samajwadi Party General Secretary, Amar Singh, is a disquieting reminder of the urgent need to review the safeguards of the surveillance system. The circumstances of the case, in which a private detective and an employee of a private telecom company have been arrested, suggest that it is a very serious matter. The charge that Mr. Singh's phone was tapped cannot be rebutted, as Congress representatives have sought to do, by insinuating that it was levelled to settle political scores. Neither can it be convincingly dealt with by declaring that the Home Ministry is conducting an in-house inquiry into the matter. Such responses suggest a cover-up. A full-fledged, honest investigation must be carried out to unearth the conspiracy behind the illegal phone tap. Over the past two decades, controversies over telephone tapping have broken out intermittently. President Zail Singh accused the Rajiv Gandhi Government of bugging Rashtrapati Bhavan telephones. Ramakrishna Hegde was forced to resign as Chief Minister in 1988 following an uproar over phone tapping of his political rivals. In 1990, Chandra Shekhar, who was to become Prime Minister soon, alleged that his telephone was tapped by the National Front Government. These are only the high-profile cases.

Even if the truth varies from case to case, the general pattern of allegations suggests that those in power are not averse to bending the law when it comes to tracking telephone conversations. Surveillance through the interception of messages and conversations may be necessary under certain circumstances, especially when terrorism is a live threat. The Indian Telegraph Act, 1885 gives the Centre and State Governments the power to intercept any message in case of a "public emergency" or "in the interest of public safety." It was to prevent the arbitrary exercise of this power that the Supreme Court framed guidelines in 1996 to regulate such surveillance. Observing that illegal phone tapping was "a serious violation of individual privacy," the Court laid down the following conditions: orders for taps must originate at the Home Secretary level; such orders must apply only for a limited period; and they must be issued only when the required information cannot be collected by other means. With the tremendous expansion of mobile phone services and use, the advances in snooping techniques, and the entry of a number of private players into the telecom sector, it is necessary to review the 1996 safeguards rigorously, from the standpoint of citizens' rights. There are two sets of problems that need to be resolved here. One is the apparently frequent abuse by intelligence agencies of their limited, supposedly regulated legal power. Such abuse is made easier by the obligation imposed on mobile service providers to make dedicated surveillance lines available to the agencies. The other set of issues arises from the new technological capabilities available for privatised, freelance, rogue tapping. If India is not to become an eavesdropper's paradise, there must be a serious attempt to tighten the regulations that govern the tapping of telephones and crack down on violations of the citizen's right to privacy.

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