Pvt security agency handled phone intercepts

NEW DELHI: Big Brother's listening in. It surfaced during a hearing on the Amar Singh phone tap case in Supreme Court on Wednesday that the government had been intercepting calls on a massive scale before new norms were put in place in 2006.

On Singh's telephone interception by Reliance Infocomm on the basis of a forged letter from the joint commissioner of Delhi Police, solicitor general Gopal Subramaniam said it was engineered by a private security agency employee contracted by the service provider to receive interception orders from official agencies.

On learning that the security agency was unlicensed, the bench said most of their kind employed men to provide musclemen for dubious activities, including arm-twisting to recover loans.

Subramaniam said that prior to enforcement of 2006 guidelines, it was a common practice among service providers to employ private securitymen to receive interception orders from the agencies.

The court wanted to know why such orders, fraught with the danger of invading someone's privacy, were either handed over to designated private securitymen or allowed to be collected by them from investigating agencies.

Solicitor general Gopal Subramaniam said the practice had been discontinued but at that time, it was resorted to avoid a policeman from roaming in the service providers' office in search of the nodal officer in charge of interception.