Intelligence Agencies Are Brain- dead
Pakistan’s role in fanning Muslim discontent is yet to be established
Five intelligence agencies have failed miserably in their task of Internet patrolling and cyber warfare. The National Technical Research Organisation ( NTRO), Intelligence Bureau ( IB), Research and Analysis Wing ( R& AW), Defence Intelligence Agency ( DIA) and Computer Emergency Response Team ( CERT) under the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology have not been able to nail Pakistan’s involvement in the information war launched in the wake of the Assam violence in late July. They were also not able to alert the Government in time to the chatter building up on social media platforms against the violence.
It took the Government more than a month to realise that social media was inundated with video clips and disinformation aimed at spreading fear among the people of the North- east living across the country. In its report on “use of social media to generate unrest and violence among different communities”, the Ministry of Home Affairs ( MHA) admits that inflammatory content was being posted on the Internet since July 13. However, it was only after violence in Mumbai and the exodus of people from the North- east from Bangalore, Pune, Chennai and Hyderabad that the Government traced it to social media, and the fact that it was being uploaded from Pakistan. MHA started investigations only after the Mumbai violence on August 11. By then, it was too late.
India is also having problems in identifying the servers where the inflammatory content was uploaded. They have identified 310 Web pages uploaded on various social networking portals including Facebook, Google, Yahoo! and Twitter so far. As of August 22, the Government had managed to block 207 pages. But it has asked the US for help since the servers of main social networking sites are based there. “We need to establish the chain of such content being uploaded. Most of it is suspected to be from Pakistan. The US can help us,” says an MHA official. India is also banking on cooperation from Saudi Arabia and Egypt since the proxy servers from these countries were used to upload a lot of hate content.
Cyber intelligence is one of the main tasks of NTRO which was set up in 2004 on the recommendation of the Kargil
Review Committee under PMO. Out of the total Rs 1,800 crore budget, its cyber security unit has an annual allocation of Rs 300 crore. It has 200 men whose job is to protect critical cyber infrastructure, cyber patrolling to check for any inflammatory content inimical to national interest, Internet monitoring to generate intelligence, and cyber offensive to carry out attacks against the enemy. “It has failed on all fronts. Earlier, when the computers in the PMO and Indian foreign missions were attacked by Chinese hackers, NTRO could do nothing,” says the MHA official.
There is also a whiff of corruption. Supreme Court is monitoring PMO’s investigations into a Rs 800- crore procurement scandal highlighted by whistleblower V. K. Mittal, a former senior scientist with NTRO. NTRO’s cyber security unit is using outdated equipment purchased in 2007 from a Bangalore- based private company, Paladion. In fact, a government interministerial group, in its report in March 2012, criticised NTRO for using a private company to set up its Internet monitoring system instead of using the system developed by the Defence Research and Development Organisation’s Centre for Artificial Intelligence and Robotics ( CAIR).
R& AW uses the CAIR system but does not have enough trained manpower to use it effectively. DIA has been focusing on military intelligence and CERT has not even started functioning properly yet. “India’s cyber security is a story of not enough technically trained people, inadequate and outdated systems and lack of coordination,” says a former intelligence official, adding Pakistan is much better placed. “They use private expert hackers to attack Indian sites from servers placed in other countries. Even if they are traced, they can always say that it was not sponsored by the government,” he explains. “The only solution is to counter- attack the servers that are indulging in information warfare against the country. Only then will the message go across that India is ready for war on the Internet.”