Did government bodies like Secretariat, Intelligence Bureau, NTRO and NIA deal with Italy’s Hacking Team?

MUMBAI | NEW DELHI: If the purported internal emails hijacked from Hacking Team and published by WikiLeaks can be believed, the Italian surveillance software vendor was in talks to sell spyware and technology to several Indian government agencies from 2013 to as recently as last month.

Potential buyers named in the emails include the Cabinet Secretariat, Intelligence Bureau, National Technical Research Organisation (the technical arm of security services), National Investigation Agency, and the police departments of states such as Delhi, Gujarat, Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu.

WikiLeaks published a searchable database of more than a million purported emails from Hacking Team, which showed the company had worked for a slew of governments and that the Federal Bureau of Investigation in the US had paid more than $800,000 on the company's tools. The emails were released after Hacking Team itself was hacked.

One of the emails dated May 6, 2014, purportedly from Anupam Tripathi, general manager of business development at Semco India, to Daniel Maglietta of Hacking Team, said Semco had marketed spyware products to several “authorised government” customers.

Asecond mail sent on the same day said an initial proposal had been sent to Cabinet Secretariat, and that a second proposal was needed for the Intelligence Bureau. An email from Tripathi raises concerns of what might happen to the procurement should “the issue comes out into the open domain”. Semco and Hacking Team, as well as Titan Overseas, another Indian company mentioned in the emails, didn’t respond to ET’s emails seeking comment. Government agencies couldn’t be immediately reached for comment.

Meanwhile, in February last year, the documents showed, Maglietta sent an email to Walter Furlan at Hacking Team, saying that some Indian customers would like to see a webinar on the solutions. The customers named in the email were the Research and Analysis Wing, NIA and the Intelligence Bureau. “Probably someone from NTRO (National Tech Research Organization) will join,” the email added.

The rest of the emails in the series were in Italian, and ET couldn’t fully translate them.

Another series of emails, with the subject line 'First Use Case – India' and sent as recently as this June, shows an individual called Prabhakar Kasu was brokering a deal for the intelligence unit of the Andhra Pradesh police.

“I am proposing cellular interception hardware solutions for urgent need in a South Indian state. I am attaching completed questionnaire keeping in view the needs of this intel unit. Please give me an estimate on costs so I will share it with client ( AP Police intel) and try to convince them on considering it for their immediate needs,” Kasu wrote in the email addressed to Maglietta.

Maglietta informed Kasu that a rough estimate of the cost would be about $1-1.2 million. The role of the intermediaries who communicated with Hacking Team is questionable, said observers. “The government must probe the role of private intermediaries such as Semco and Titan Overseas Corporation.

They make no mention of this side of their business – procuring surveillance (products) – anywhere on their websites,” said Pranesh Prakash, policy director at the Centre for Internet and Society.

All governments buy surveillance technology but in wake of former US National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden's revelations of widespread snooping, there has been greater focus on safeguards. “If the government is buying surveillance technology, it should ideally announce to citizens how the privacy safeguards are being integrated with deployment of this technology.

It should also explain how it is ensuring that the foreign origins of this sinister technology are definitely not a threat to national security,” said Chinmayi Arun, research director at the Center for Communication Governance at National Law University.

The Hacking Team has in the past been accused of selling surveillance tools and technology to nations with poor human rights records. Emails show Indian trade organisations had written to the company for exhibiting technology at different trade events in India.