NGOs flag ‘generalised surveillance’ of citizens in Delhi High Court

The Center for Public Interest Litigation and the Software Freedom Law Centre on Thursday flagged what they said was “generalised surveillance” of Indian citizens by the Government, in an ongoing case before the Delhi High Court. Advocate Prashant Bhushan argued on behalf of the non-profits that in a “press release,” the Internet Service Providers Association of India said that the “government has ordered us to provide all the traffic which goes through the internet to their Monitoring System.“ Mr. Bhushan was referring to a regulatory submission that was obtained from the Department of Telecommunications in November 2022, where the ISPAI admitted that broadband providers “are mandated to connect their systems to the CMS facility”, and that “law enforcement agencies are provided facility for on-line and real-time monitoring of traffic.” “This effectively means everything— all our private communications, all our emails, all our phone calls, everything will be piped into the Central Monitoring System,” Mr. Bhushan charged in court. “This kind of centralized monitoring taking place through these three systems: the Central Monitoring System, NETRA and NATGRID, these are generalized surveillance, not on a case-to-case basis,” Mr. Bhushan said, referring to three communications interception systems the Government runs to intercept network and call traffic. A two judge bench of Delhi High Court chief justice Satish Chandra Sharma and Subramonium Prasad ordered the Government to file a reply in the case within six weeks.