Indian Government To Monitor & Control Your Facebook, Twitter, YouTube Activity

The intelligence bureau (IB) of Indian Government believes that the telecom service providers do not have the capability to intercept the communications made on the Internet via popular social networking websites like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. According to Upgrade tech to intercept GenNext websites: IB to telecom companies - The Economic Times, the IB has asked the TSPs to upgrade their technology, software and infrastructure to monitor the communications happening through the next generation website that employ modern Web 2.0 technologies. The Indian Government intends to be prepared to prevent the misuse of the Internet. One of the IB's joint directors mentioned that they plan to have adequate measures & facilities to intercept these modern websites and the current quality of captured data isn't very good. The Department of Telecom (DoT) has been instructed to make sure that all the telecom services providers have the technical capability to monitor the web traffic to a deeper extent.

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The Indian Government is actually planning to set up a dedicated web monitoring agency which will be responsible to track all the communication happening in India via Internet media. This agency won't be effective unless the telecom operators have the technology to penetrate into the websites that thrive on the user generated content. Web 2.0 technologies have enabled never imagined before uses of Internet as a medium and intercepting modern website requires newer software and technology. The recent violence in Assam has led to the Government believe that they need better ways of capturing the  information shared on the Internet.

The government does have the power to remove and block the malicious content shared on the social networking website and there's a provision for it in the Section 69A of the IT Act of 2000. The government had cited this section recently to block several pages from Facebook and Google recently.

The Technical Challenge


Though the government has issued directives to make sure they can capture data - it's going to be a huge challenge to process the amount of data that gets generated on the Internet on daily or should we say hourly basis. India's got about 30 million citizens on Facebook and millions of photos, comments are shared on Facebook every month. The current technology to monitor the web traffic is still mostly based around capturing of suspicious keywords and then making a meaning out of those keywords using the context. Unfortunately, it's easier to break through it. The bigger challenge is to analyse the images for the malicious content and it's even more challenging to analyse videos. The shear volume of the content posted on the popular social networks is mind-boggling and monitoring the data on continuous basis is a big technical challenge. It'd be interesting to see how the TSPs, DoT and IB go about it.

We wish to ask our users about their opinion on Government's stance on the whole information sharing via Internet. If the Government successfully sets up web monitoring agency; then be sure that none of your 'privacy' settings will work - because the Government still controls the cables and spectrum that carry all the data. Do you think the Government is right and a web monitoring agency is the need of the hour? Or do you think it's a gross breach of your privacy on the Internet?

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