No PLACE to HIDE

It is very easy to bug—and to get bugged. Inside the world of everyday spying

Nearly 40 years before news broke out that snooping devices were allegedly found in the home of Indian Cabinet minister Nitin Gadkari, American Senator Frank Church, after investigating the capabilities of US security agencies, had made a chilling forecast: “There would be no place to hide.” Journalist Glenn Greenwald liberally borrowed the phrase for his 2013 book, No Place to Hide, on National Security Agency recruit Edward Snowden who blew the whistle on the US administration’s widespread surveillance of its citizens and others.

Indian Home Minister Rajnath Singh and Gadkari himself have denied the report of bugging, calling it highly speculative, though BJP gadfly Subramanian Swamy has pitched in with juicy tales of the proverbial ‘American hand’ in the whole exercise.

Whatever the rumours are, it is true that not just in the US, but across the world as a whole, facts about the modern-day invasion of people’s privacy are much stranger than fiction. Snowden said so last year. Years earlier, in the Hollywood spy thriller Enemy of the State, Gene Hackman, who played the role of an ageing former NSA agent, explained to Will Smith, a lawyer on the run with a secret that could send top federal agents to jail for the murder of a Congressman, why it was nearly impossible not to leave a footprint. “In the old days, we actually had to tap a wire into your phone line. Now with calls bouncing off satellites, they snatch ‘em right out of the air,” he said, highlighting the near omniscience of State- run surveillance operations.

It’s not just the government. Since the days of the Church and the late 1990s’ Hackman movie, snooping has gone dizzyingly hi-tech, and a digital cloud is now capable of making public the private lives of people even without human intervention; just as art often reflects life, the soon- to-be-released Cameron Diaz-starrer Sex Tape portrays the plight of a young couple who discover one morning that the sex tape they made of themselves the previous night has been uploaded on iCloud, which syncs their personal iPad with all the other iPads they had gifted to friends and family for Christmas. The scenario is grim: technology is designed to snoop on you.

THE LOCAL SCENARIO

Interestingly, despite official denials, the swirling Gadkari controversy has highlighted a growing menace: the easy availability in India of quick-to-use bugging tools, both cheap and expensive, that aid in listening to conversations between anyone—even those of powerful ministers. Early reports had suggested that the spying took place during UPA rule and on Gadkari’s Mumbai residence, but there were also rumours afloat that the bugs were found in the bedroom of his Teenmurti Lane residence recently. The controversy is a reminder that it is almost impossible to keep secrets, once uttered. A former Home Ministry official puts it succinctly, “A secret is something that only you and another person know, and the other person is dead.”

Indians have been slow to peep, but the demand for high-end espionage devices has been growing rapidly over the past decade, with even small business rivals smuggling in equipment with near impunity in a country where such tools are almost never tagged and monitored, though there are stringent rules in place. The most effective device on the block is a passive interceptor that would pass off as a laptop at airport security checkpoints.

Corporations and individuals are increasingly using electronic espionage to track what their rivals do and say. They have also managed to get hold of advanced technology and sophisticated know-how to bug and retrieve phone calls, text messages, Facebook chats, WhatsApp exchanges, Skype calls, BlackBerry Messenger details and almost anything one does via a computer or phone. You don’t have to stealthily sneak into a room carrying cables or risk being captured like WaterGate burglars. “The more you pay, the better and more effective bugging gets. Unlike in the US, nobody keeps tracks of spying devices you own. It is so easy,” says a Home Ministry official.

CORPORATE WARS

When Central agencies such as India’s National Technical Research Organisation (NTRO), Research & Analysis Wing (RAW) and Intelligence Bureau (IB) monitor private chats between individuals, it rarely makes it to the media, claims a government official. On the other hand, when companies hire detective agencies, the latter tend to advertise what they have achieved with the hope of getting more clients. Passive GSM interceptors—laptop-like machines that can intercept and record hundreds of simultaneous calls within its operational radius of 2-5 km—are not yet being made in India, but usually make their way into the country from Dubai, where companies based in countries such as Israel, China and Ukraine sell their wares. Thanks to a spurt in demand, the cost of this machine has fallen in the past nine years from Rs 5 crore to Rs 2 crore.

These interceptors work like this: the device makes a call to an individual’s phone, and, if received, can record any call, SMS or other communication from or to that phone by ‘reading’ the handset’s International Mobile Equipment Identity code, a 15-digit ‘IMEI’ number that is useful for blocking the phone in case of theft or loss.

While the use of such machines is highly regulated and monitored by regulatory bodies in countries such as the US and in several parts of Europe, India exercises control only on the sale and import of such products. “Customs officials can hardly make out the difference between a passive interceptor and a laptop,” says a Defence Ministry official. Suppliers of the product are thought to include the now-blacklisted Shogi Communications, which is currently said to be operating in Dubai. Agencies such as the NTRO and even police forces are allowed the use of passive interceptors, but some of these had reportedly fallen into misuse at the hands of unscrupulous officers who snoop on opposition leaders in states such as Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and elsewhere to please their ruling-regime masters; various allegations had forced a probe of the matter during GK Pillai’s stint as home secretary at the Centre.

The Home Department was asked to keep a list of the devices available in the country and the police were asked to return them; Open couldn’t verify if the order was implemented or not. Pillai has stayed silent about the outcome. At least two officials have said that such devices were used to tap the phone records of rivals at the height of corporate rivalries some years ago.

THE ART OF CONCEALING

In Delhi’s crowded Gaffar Market, one of Asia’s largest electronics shopping centres, ‘bugs’ are available in plenty. Mostly Chinese made, they are priced from Rs 7,000 to Rs 50,000 and above. Such bugs, powered by tiny power cells, can secretly be dropped inside a room. Some of them operate by tuning into a ‘dead FM channel’ frequency, on which a spy could listen to people’s conversation within the bug’s range. Some of them on display have a life of merely three hours. “These are used by the majority. Their main customers are private detectives often hired to investigate the secret lives of close relatives,” says the Home Ministry official.

These devices sometimes make their way into ministerial offices in Delhi.

Three years ago, reports emerged that there were attempts to bug Pranab Mukherjee’s office. It emerged that Mukherjee, who was India’s Finance Minister then, had written to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh the previous year that an electronic sweep conducted by the Central Board of Direct Taxes (CBDT) found ‘adhesives’ planted in his office, as also those of his advisor Omita Paul and his private secretary Manoj Pant; the Ministry’s two conference halls were also allegedly bugged. Though no listening devices were discovered, the recovery of a glue-like substance from ‘crucial locations in the finance ministry’ suggested an attempt to plant bugs in the office, concluded the subsequent inquiry. At the time, Mukherjee was engaged in a cold war of sorts with the then Home Minister, P Chidambaram. Notably, contrary to an IB finding that the adhesive-like substance in the rooms was only chewing gum, the agency hired by the CBDT said it could have been an attempt to spy on Mukherjee.

There have been many more such cases, including accusations against the US NSA for keeping tabs on the activities of senior BJP leaders in 2010. This appeared recently in an expose by WikiLeaks.

Similarly, two years ago, BJP leader Yashwant Sinha alleged that Chidambaram had ordered the tapping of his phone after he charged the Congress leader with involvement in the Aircel-Maxis scam. The same year, at the height of the tussle between the Defence Ministry and the Army with General VK Singh as its chief, the military intelligence wing detected a listening device in the office of the then Defence Minister, AK Antony. Last year, a controversy broke out when the Gujarat government was accused of snooping on a young girl under the orders of current BJP President Amit Shah. The girl’s family, however, made no complaint over the matter, and instead thanked the government for offering them security.

BLACKMAIL AND DEAL MAKING

The private chats on Facebook of the wives of three BJP leaders involving a rising star of the party in Haryana recently became public, thanks to snoopers. Facebook’s own team found objectionable matter in these chats; if authentic, they had even talked about supplying girls to clinch deals. Facebook monitors accounts for attempts to solicit clients for prostitution and other nefarious activities on its network. Since American agencies that were in possession of these chats found the content ‘objectionable and subversive’, they passed the information on to Indian agencies. “They could be in for some trouble for talking about influencing a leader through clever means and for conspiring to secure money through dirty ways,” says a police official.

Interestingly, a former cricket official has made tapping phones and mapping of his rivals’ computers a means of survival. The person in question hired former Mossad operatives based in London to access various details of his detractors, including their credit card records, emails and phone conversations to “more or less” blackmail them into silence, reveals a person in the know, though Open couldn’t confirm this. He also managed to track BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) chats. “Which is how he has lassoed his opponents in cricket institutions,” says the Home Ministry official.

Last year, private detectives and policemen who worked at the behest of a BJP worker were arrested in connection with collecting call detail records (CDRs) of senior BJP leaders Arun Jaitley, Gadkari and several others. The Delhi Police said it was Anurag Singh, a private detective who had illegally tapped the phones of Amar Singh in 2005, who had procured the CDRs of Jaitley and others. Singh’s firm, V-Detect, was a detective agency offering intelligence, risk analysis, bank fraud investigative services, matrimonial, kidnapping, theft and burglary investigations, according to its website.

The country has had no dearth of phone tapping controversies. In 2010, newspapers, TV channels and websites published transcripts of phone taps by the Income Tax Department of the chats that the now-infamous Niira Radia, who ran the PR agency Vaishnavi, had with reporters, editors, telecom minister A Raja and various others, triggering a major controversy.

On several occasions, the NTRO had come under attack for tapping the phones of politicians; the organisation has denied any wrongdoing.

MODUS OPERANDI

Besides cell-run bugs, there are those that can be connected to a power source inside a digital phone. This is done by installing special software on this phone (via its digital switchboard) by bribing a telephone boy or an insider. You could also turn your cellphone into a bugging device. A so-called ‘dummy phone’ can be used to record conversations within a room even if the handset is not actively recording or attending a call. This is done by asking a person to make a call while you are in a room with another person whose conversation you want to monitor. You need not take the call, yet it will record and relay the conversation for the other person’s ears. Other close-range ‘bugs’ could be in the form of a USB or pen or pair of glasses.

Granite Island Group, a Boston- based technical surveillance agency, has classified various types of bugs and techniques. An Ultrasonic or VLF Bug converts sound into an audio signal above the range of human hearing; the ultrasonic signal is then intercepted nearby and converted back to an audible voice. In this case, audio pressure waves are used instead of creating a radio signal.

The other, an RF (or radio frequency) bug is the most popular type of bugging device. According to Granite’s website, a radio transmitter is placed in an area or a device. This is your classic Martini olive bug. Cheap and disposable, this one is easy to detect—an equipped specialist can spot this kind of device at a significant distance—even if tracing it back to the person who planted it is difficult. An optical bug, in contrast, is a bugging device that converts sound (or data) into an optical pulse or beam of light. A good example of this would be an active or passive laser listening device.

THE OLD DAYS

Though not quite on the lines of the compulsive voyeur and Soviet tyrant Stalin, who would have the phones of his politburo comrades wiretapped and stay awake all night listening to their conversations, India’s rulers have also had a passion for eavesdropping.

The late President Giani Zail Singh feared that many rooms in the Rashtrapati Bhavan were bugged, presumably under the instructions of then Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, with whom he shared strained ties. Zail Singh, it is said, used to meet journalists and his friends on the lawns of the presidential palace so that his conversations with them could not be monitored.

For his part, the late Rajiv Gandhi had claimed in 1990 that two Haryana intelligence men arrested outside his residence were keeping watch on politicians who were meeting him and listening to his conversations with them. Much earlier, in a dramatic disclosure, Maneka Gandhi, had hit out at mother-in-law Indira Gandhi for putting her under 24-hour surveillance, tapping her phone and censoring her mail.

“Meeting someone physically under the bridge or in parks, as you see in the movies, is still the best way to stay off the radar,” says a senior police officer. “But not quite,” he adds. “The sharp eye of satellites can monitor you almost anywhere in the world.”

Anti-bugging measures have it much tougher delivering results and are far more expensive than bugging. At top offices like the PMO, various security measures are already in place. In Parliament, a Tetra radio network, which doesn’t get jammed in disaster situations, was installed a few years ago. Tetra handsets allow security personnel to access security information including images of visitors and vehicles at the push of a button; they also enhance access control.

INVASIONS OF PRIVACY

While human rights groups keep attacking various data-mining schemes, including those in India such as Aadhaar and Natgrid, saying that they violate the individual’s right to privacy, governments across the world have not batted an eyelid in going ahead with them.

Natgrid, for example, which is meant to route information from 21 data sources to user agencies, will have access to categories of database such as income tax, bank account details, credit-card transactions, railway and air travel, visa, immigration records, etcetera. On the other side of the globe, the US has faced criticism over its NSA having tapped the phone conversations of some 35 world leaders for nearly five years. The NSA ended a programme that tapped the phone of German Chancellor Angela Merkel and other leaders after the White House discovered the operation during a review of intelligence operations in 2013.

“Looks like there is no place to stay anonymous,” says an Indian government official, referring to what Western powers are up to. “They see everything through satellites. What they do about it is an altogether different matter,” he says, emphasising that “if the Government wants, it could tackle the Maoist menace in no time; it has the information and capabilities, and that is no exaggeration”. Maybe he is right.

A scene from Enemy of the State in which Smith and Hackmman are fleeing from a haven offers a sense of just how omnipresent the big eye now is:

Smith: What the hell is happening?
Hackman: I blew up the building.
Smith: Why?
Hackman: Because you made a phone call.

A phone call may not set a house on fire, but it could blow up your reputation—or force you into a bargain you least expected.

About The Author

Ullekh NP

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