PrivacyIndia

For those agitated over the big brother snooping on their lives, there is more bad news in store as India's external intelligence agency, the Research & Analysis Wing (R&AW) has been notified by the UPA government as an "authorised agen-cy" to legally intercept phone calls, e-mails and all forms of data, voice and electronic communications with immediate effect. This is the first time in R&AW's history since its inception in 1967 that it has been allowed to snoop on Indian citizens in addition to its espionage activities abroad.

New Delhi: Indian citizens won't be shielded from prying by government agencies if the Union home ministry gets its way with the proposed privacy law. The ministry is insisting that intelligence and law enforcement agencies be kept out of the purview of the proposed Act, and allowed to continue monitoring the activities and carry out electronic surveillance of citizens, officials familiar with the situation said.

IT is 30 years since a Congress Member of Parliament, V.N. Gadgil, suggested an Act for the protection of privacy, designed, no doubt, to curb press exposure of the wrongdoings of politicians. In reality, it is all but impossible to draft a statute that strikes a fair balance between people's right to know and the protection of a person's privacy. In India, as in the United Kingdom, there is no tort of privacy. India's law of torts (that is, civil wrongs punishable in damages) is based on case law, English and foreign. However, the Supreme Court of India has inferred right to privacy from the ones explicitly guaranteed. Article 21 of the Constitution contains a guarantee of personal liberty and it is obvious that personal liberty also involves the right to privacy.

NEW DELHI: Delhi Police is in the process of acquiring its own internet monitoring system, capable of directly accessing emails, chats and other web content posted by a suspect as well as tapping into net communications through mobile phones. The new interception system would be a parallel tapping mechanism, doing away with the need to approach an Internet service provider for access to specific email and other content, as is the case at present.

The RFP will be floated on the basis of the recommendations of an expert panel on specifications for cameras and connectivity. The panel includes IIT professors and senior state officials (who are former IITians). The state plans to install 5,000 CCTV cameras at sensitive locations in the city as part of the surveillance network. The project is estimated to cost Rs 600 crore.- Sandeep Ashar

With India planning a huge database of 1.5 crore criminals for matching with the hand or face sample of an accused, the criminals or terror mongers will find it much tougher to hide. A fingerprint or a face in a CCTV shot captured from a crime or terror scene anywhere in India would lead the law-enforcing authorities straight to the culprit at the click of a button. The home ministry is working on an ambitious project to collect the fingerprints, palm prints, faces and iris samples of all the arrested and convicted persons in the country and store these in a central database. This biometric data will be accessible to all the police units across the country for getting real-time results on the identity of a suspect. Read more at: http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/home-ministry-plans-national-database-on-criminals/1/157679.html

The Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas has brought in an amendment to its Liquefied Petroleum Gas (Regulation of Supply and Distribution) Order 2000 making the Unique Identification Number (UID) under the Aadhaar project must for availing LPG refills.

To Bolster the surveillance capability, the Chandigarh Police is set to acquire an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle 'Netra' for Rs 35 lakh as necessary certificates from the Defence Research and Development Organisation has reached them. Now, the proposal will be sent to Chandigarh Administration to take a final decision on it. "The acquisition of the UAV has been delayed as the company that had developed 'Netra' had submitted certificates from its side, but the 'propriety certificate' and 'reasonability certificate' (a certificate indicating that the rates quoted are not more than that charged to other government bodies or PSUs) from the DRDO were awaited," said Alok Kumar, Deputy Inspector General of Police, Chandigarh.

On Wednesday, acting Chief Justice of the high court AK Sikri, while hearing an unrelated case, had asked traffic police to desist from publishing names and photographs of violators on its social networking site as it involved breach of privacy. The court had said that it "may take cognizance" of such action in future.

Kolkata The recent order by the Criminal Investigation Department to its units to stop phone tapping as part of monitoring of crimes has caused a concern among a section of the CID investigators. It may be noted that when Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee took over the office, she had said that police tapped phones indiscriminately and that it had to stop. The CID order is seen as a follow up action, sources said.

The country's top planning body the Planning Commission is working on a national privacy policy following fears of the civil society that the government was trying to get private information of individuals without enough safeguards. The plan panel has constituted an expert group under the chairmanship of former chief justice of Delhi high court AP Shah to draft a legislative framework to ensure technical safeguards against misuse of the private information sought by the government for grounds of national security or delivery of welfare measures.

JALANDHAR: The students of Lovely Professional University, Punjab's first private university, will remain under the watchful eyes of their parents, even when they are studying in their classrooms or working in the laboratories. The university has installed 2,400 CCTV cameras in the classrooms and at other places on the campus. They university authorities are working to provide access to live footage of the CCTVs to the parents. Over 25,000 students, including 600 from foreign countries, are studying in the university.

Empowering the investigating agencies, the Delhi High Court on Friday ruled that the fingerprints or specimen handwriting of an accused taken by an Investigating Officer during probe into a case was admissible as evidence even though a permission from a magistrate was not taken.

NEW DELHI: The Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) is looking into a complaint of misuse of personal data while issuing 'Aadhaar' numbers to individuals, its first case of breach of privacy.

The Indian Institute of Technology-Bombay (IIT-B) is set to become the first educational campus in the country to function through unique identification (UID) numbers. The UID-enabled campus will work towards making a cashless environment where all transactions from buying a notebook to a parantha in the canteen will be done through UID numbers and biometric (fingerprint) authentication.

NEW DELHI: The government has asked telecom operators and internet service providers (ISPs) to install indigenously developed monitoring equipment, in a move aimed at increasing surveillance of internet traffic. Post installation, the cost of which will have to be borne by operators, the equipment produced by state-owned research agency C-DoT will be manned by the government's security agencies.

MUMBAI: Teachers from schools and colleges in Thane are a worried lot. A Government Resolution (GR) dated April 18 states that all those teaching at government-aided schools and colleges need to get their Unique Identification (UID) card created before August 20, or they will not receive their salaries for the month. A notice has been pasted at the Thane Zilla Parishad Pay Unit and schools and college authorities have already informed their staff about it. "We have already informed our teachers to get their cards done as soon as possible. We haven't received any circular from the zilla parishad, but the notice has been put up at the bill submission centre and we are only following orders," said Harshida Someshwar, principal (junior college) of NKT College in Thane.

BANGALORE: The Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) has hit a legal bump. Questioning the project's legality, V K Somasekhar, founder-trustee of Grahak Shakti, and Mathew Thomas, a retired Army officer of Citizens' Action Forum, have issued notices to UIDAI chairperson and Planning Commission chairperson and deputy chairperson.

The Securities and Exchange Board of India has sought powers to seek e-mail and call records from telecom service providers. This move, the market regulator hopes, will help it prevent black money entering the market as also keep an eye on insider trading. The Minister of State for Finance, Mr Namo Narain Meena, told the Lok Sabha in a written reply on August 12 (unstarred question no 2091) that SEBI also wants to be in the list of law enforcement/investigating agencies that includes the CBI and the IB. A formal request has been sent to the Department of Telecommunications.