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The Intelligence Bureau has demanded the communication ministry to block the VoIP services from and to India till the DoT implements the caller tracking system. IB has called for this action as it feels that India lacks the potential for tracking the internet calls. It has called for an "early solution to this issue in the interest of national security".
"In the absence of Caller Line Identification (CLI) parameters of calls landing from abroad, it's next to impossible to identify the country of location of the caller. Moreover, of late a number of service providers in India have started providing VoIP solutions for making calls both domestics as well as foreign. The calls passing through the VoIP/IP route contain inadequate parameters rendering it impossible to trace the actual callers. As DoT had conveyed that it is not possible to mandate transmission of CLI from abroad, we had approached DoT to block such calls till a technical solution is found," the IB said in its communication to the DoT.
The implementation of a call tracking system will affect numerous people who use these services as they come at a lower cost to phones and free of cost to computers. Telecom operators like MTNL in Delhi and Mumbai as well as many other ISPs offer these VoIP services. Some of the other service providers of VoIP are Skype, Google, Yahoo! and Window Live.
Cyber security expert Vijay Mukhi said that IB should have issued such directions immediately after the 26/11 terror attacks. "The terrorists used net telephony as they were aware that India did not have the technological capabilities to do a live trace of such calls”.
“In the US and Europe, all players who offer VoIP services have provisions that allow governments to track these calls. Many of them have also installed equipment at their premises to monitor VoIP calls upon orders from governments," he added.
The IB has also called for DoT’s action on issue related to security including the purchasing of routers & switches by private operators as wells as BSNL from Chinese vendors like Huawei & ZTE. IB has mentioned that even though Huawei is manufacturing the equipments in government-run Indian Telephone Industries, the technology is still with the manufacturer, which can be a threat to India.
