National

Hanging Up On The Eavesdroppers

Clean-up operations are on at the NTRO but who will head it: an intelligence official or a DRDO man again?

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Hanging Up On The Eavesdroppers
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On July 16 this year, the director general of foreign trade, a division of the Union ministry of commerce, issued a public notification putting off-the-air GSM monitoring devices on the restricted import list. These were the machines first imported by the NTRO and used to illegally tap phones of several key political leaders, including Congress general secretary Digvijay Singh and Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar. Outlook exposed the story in the issue dated May 3, 2010, We the Eavesdropped.

This is the first of the several moves initiated by the government to fix any possible interception of calls by a rogue intelligence agency in future. In the case of NTRO, matters were compounded by the fact that it is not one of the eight security agencies which have the mandate to intercept calls.

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Much of the clean-up is being spearheaded by national security advisor Shiv Shankar Menon, who, sources say, has also asked the comptroller & auditor general of India to undertake an audit of the organisation. “The mess is so big that it will take at least a year to clean it all up,” a senior security official told Outlook.

In May this year, Union home secretary G.K. Pillai said that a committee of secretaries is exploring the possibility of a comprehensive law that will prevent a recurrence of such illegal phone taps. “We have already held a few meetings and once we have a roadmap in place, we will implement it,” Pillai told Outlook on the sidelines of a monthly press briefing.

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But key to the proposed reforms is a comprehensive inquiry ordered by the NSA months ago and being conducted by NTRO advisor P.V. Kumar. The first part of the report was sent to the NSA a few weeks ago and returned with a set of comprehensive orders seeking a slew of measures, including legal, to ensure that all acts of corruption, illegal recruitments and misuse of powers by officials are fixed.

According to sources, the NSA was unhappy at the delay in the submission of the report prepared by Kumar. With the possible culpability of some top NTRO officials coming up in the inquiry, it has raised serious questions about the health of the organisation.

However, with NTRO now looking for a new chief, it will be interesting to see if a serving intelligence official takes over or the control slips back to the DRDO.

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