Cell Phone Nation: How Mobile Phones Have Revolutionized Business, Politics and Ordinary Life in India (39 page)

Great corporations, leading politicians and some of the wealthiest and most sophisticated people in India were involved in the cell-phone industry. Thousands of crores of rupees (billions of dollars) were invested in it in the twenty years after 1995,
⁶⁶
and private fortunes could be made on the basis of decisions about the legal framework of telecommunications. For the rich and the influential—and those who wished to be—the mobile phone became an item so commonplace that they forgot its latent capacity as a broadcaster. Sophisticates appeared naïve, lulled into a misplaced sense of intimacy and face-to-face exclusiveness, when using mobile phones. The most famous of publicised private conversations were the so-called ‘Radia tapes’, made public in 2010. Niira Radia, a well-connected public relations consultant, had two of India’s most elite companies from the Tata and Mukesh Ambani groups among her clients. During the negotiations to form a new government after the national elections of 2009, Radia lobbied for particular candidates to be appointed ministers in portfolios where her clients had interests. Minister of Communications was such a job, and she lobbied to have A. Raja, a Dalit member of the DMK, which was then the ruling party in Tamil Nadu state, appointed to the post.

There was
probably nothing illegal or even unusual in what Radia was doing—eliciting information and cajoling influential people. Unknown to her, however, the conversations were being recorded by the Income Tax department. There was nothing illegal, either, about a government department, provided it had a court order, tapping the conversations of someone it had reason to believe was cheating on tax returns. The recordings, however, were subsequently leaked, almost certainly illegally, to an activist lawyer who submitted them to the Supreme Court in support of public-interest litigation aimed at exposing corruption over the allocation of 2G Radio Frequency spectrum. The recordings were leaked again—no doubt, illegally—to the news magazines,
Outlook
and
Open
. The transcripts and recordings became public in November 2010.
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A. Raja resigned as Communications Minister in same month, was arrested in February 2011 and imprisoned without bail while his trial for corruption over the allocation of 2G spectrum in 2007–08 began (
Chapter 2
).
⁶⁸
Mobile phones entangled Raja in two ways. First, the corruption charges in which he was embroiled grew out of the struggles of mighty business and political interests to gain rights to Radio Frequency spectrum at bargain-basement fees. Second, the banality of the phone led to the indiscreet conversations that formed the ‘Radia tapes’ and sank Raja and others deeper into the mire. A leading journalist, not implicated in the recordings, wrote: ‘104 intercepted telephone conversations … cut through the tiniest cross-section of a rotting cadaver known as the Indian Establishment’.
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The banality
of the phone led those who used it to forget that the technology did not make it private. The phone could be used to track movements, and conversations could be readily listened to by anyone with simple equipment and modest training. At the same time that the ‘Radia tapes’ were preoccupying Indian news media, it was estimated between 5,000 and 6,000 phones were being ‘tapped on an average across the country’ each day by government intelligence agencies.
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The sanction of the Home Secretary (the top public servant) of the central government or a state government was necessary to allow legal tapping of phones, and it was illegal for private citizens to intercept calls. However, the Department of Revenue Intelligence of the central government estimated that 1,100 ‘tapping devices’ had been imported between 2009 and 2011, but no one was very sure where they had gone. Private detectives and private industry were two likely destinations. When the Home Ministry in 2011 ordered state governments to ‘trace and hand over to the Intelligence Bureau’ all tapping equipment in their jurisdiction, only two responses came in—from the Delhi police and the police of neighbouring Haryana state.
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No privately held equipment was surrendered.

Apprehension about the dangers to privacy from new technologies was long-standing and worldwide. Kipling’s verse, ‘A Code of Morals’, written in the 1880s, described the embarrassments a heliograph message could cause when unexpectedly read by the ‘most immoral man’ about whom a young bride was being warned. But the tale involved a heliograph machine, Morse code and a major-general; unlike the mobile phone, this was not technology for the
aam aadmii
(common man).
⁷²
In China in the twenty-first century, mobile communication was becoming, according to one scholar, ‘a “wireless leash” that shop-floor management can use as a nearly complete control and surveillance system over employees’.
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To critics, ‘information technology’ looked more like ‘the oppressor’ than ‘the liberator’.
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It enabled the state to locate citizens, listen to their conversations, read their messages and assemble information about them. The grim future scenario, ‘A Walled and Surveilled World’, imagined by Rainie and Wellman emphasised surveillance, control, self-censorship and fear.
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Freelance phone-tapping could be conducted relatively easily in India. ‘Different parts of the interceptor’, a reporter was told about monitoring equipment, ‘are often imported as separate equipment and subsequently assembled’.
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Praveen Swami, the well-connected correspondent of the
Hindu
, drew attention to the fact that two Indian companies, ClearTrail in Indore and Shoghi at Shimla,
⁷⁷
produced sophisticated monitoring equipment. Swami highlighted the way in which such equipment could escape from government control. In Punjab, one out of four units was said to have disappeared, while in Andhra Pradesh authorities ‘shut down … passive interception capabilities after [they] accidentally intercepted sensitive conversations between high officials’. In Karnataka, the police ‘accidentally intercepted conversations involving a romantic relationship between a leading politician and a movie star’.
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Three things
combined to make such activity grow. First, it was relatively easy to tap mobile-phone conversation. Second, the vast majority of users treated phone calls as if they were secluded conversations in an empty room, instead of radio broadcasts. Third, the low salaries of many police and intelligence officers meant that secrets and scandal could be bought fairly cheaply. ‘When an officer on a salary of Rs 8,000 a month has pretty much unrestricted access to this kind of technology’, a senior policeman told Praveen Swami, ‘things will go wrong’.
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Such snooping enabled blackmail, malicious gossip and settling of scores between political and business foes; but such activity usually had repercussions only within the borders of India. Spying, terrorism and violence, however, often had international implications.

Espionage and terror

Throughout the world, mobile phones became tools for espionage, crime and terror. Indeed, mobile phones and electronic surveillance were part of Western crime dramas well before the cell phone began to make a major impact on India. The acclaimed American television series,
The Wire
, began in 2002 with a series built around drug crime and phone surveillance in Baltimore, and its third series focused on cross-border crime where pre-paid mobile phones, dubbed ‘burners’, were used by drug-trafficking gangs and quickly ditched to escape police surveillance. Terrorist attacks were coordinated and carried out with the assistance of mobile phones from the 1990s. Israeli intelligence in 1996 used a mobile phone to assassinate the Palestine bomb-maker, Ayyash, known as ‘the engineer’. Ayyash accepted a bomb-laden mobile phone from a trusted companion. Using the phone detonated the device and killed him.
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In the Madrid train bombing of 2004, one of the bombs was connected to a mobile phone that functioned as timer, but the alarm, which should have triggered the bomb, failed to go off. Examination of the SIM card and handset led police to the alleged terrorist.
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(The other side of the mobile phone’s role in the Spanish attacks—the rapid dismay of the public at the disingenuousness of the government—is discussed in
Chapter 6
).
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India had
foretastes of the temptations and the perils of the technology. During the bloody little Kargil war between Indian and Pakistan in Kashmir in the summer of 1999, Indian intelligence tapped a telephone conversation between Pervez Musharraf, chief of the Pakistan armed forces, who was visiting Beijing, and a senior military colleague in Pakistan. The conversation revealed that the forces that crossed the Line of Control were Pakistani regulars, not freelance ‘guerrillas’, and that Musharraf had kept his political superiors and air force and naval colleagues ignorant of the plans for an incursion. The Indians scored a public-opinion triumph when they released the recordings to international media in June 1999.
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Two years later, after Pakistan-based terrorists attacked the Indian parliament, Indian police relied heavily on mobile-phone evidence to build a case against a teacher at a college of Delhi University. Syed Abdul Rehman Geelani spent twenty months in prison before being acquitted by the Supreme Court of India. An activist for human rights in Kashmir, Geelani and his mobile phone were picked up by police the day after the attack. Mobile phones found on the dead attackers provided a third-person link to Geelani. ‘Relying heavily on mobile phone numbers’, a journalist wrote, the police ‘have drawn up a case of conspiracy’.
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Geelani’s fateful mobile phone foreshadowed the experience of Muhamed Haneef, an Indian doctor wrongly arrested by Australian police following the Glasgow terrorist incident in July 2007—again, because of mobile-phone connections.
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Mobile phones
played a large part in the most coordinated terrorist attack experienced in India, the assault on central Mumbai by terrorists trained in Pakistan who landed by sea on the night of 26 November 2008. They held out for more than three days, killed more than 160 people and wounded more than 300. They used mobile phones, both their own, and those of their victims, to organise their actions, receive instructions and send pictures back to their handlers in Pakistan to keep them informed of the carnage. Recordings made by security services became widely available on the internet after Indian investigators made items recovered from the killers, including a satellite phone, available to selected diplomats and media outlets. The recordings demonstrated how handlers far away were able to guide the young killers.
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One transcript captured the cold-bloodedness that the distant manipulator was able to transmit over the phone.
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‘Everything is being recorded by the media. Inflict the maximum damage. Keep fighting. Don’t be taken alive’, a caller said to a gunman in the Oberoi Hotel in the early hours of the three-day rampage. ‘Throw one or two grenades at the Navy and police teams, which are outside’, came an instruction to the gunmen inside the Taj Mahal hotel. ‘Keep two magazines and three grenades aside and expend the rest of your ammunition’, went another set of instructions to the attackers inside Nariman House, which housed an Orthodox Jewish centre.
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Victims used mobile phones to call for help, or, in this case, to send an MMS of some of the action to IBN Live, a Mumbai-based television studio. Later, a telling criticism of Indian television channels was their ill-considered live coverage, watched by the killers and their bosses in Pakistan and enabling them to take counter-measures. The attack, a
New York Times
report suggested, ‘may be the most well-documented terrorist attack anywhere’.
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Cell phones were essential tools for the attackers and amulets of hope for victims. When Mumbai suffered its next terrorist bombings in July 2011, the cover of
Outlook
, a leading news magazine, showed a burned and terrified victim, staring desperately at the camera and clutching his mobile phone. (See
Illus. 35
).
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Though few people, rich or poor, gave it much thought, cell phones connected them to the state more thoroughly than ever possible in the past. Such connections could be benign. They could make it easier to pay bills, receive entitlements and book services. But the power to give and to receive information also expanded the capacity for people to harm others, commit crimes and attack the state. States saw it as a duty to protect both themselves and law-abiding citizens. Following the Mumbai attack of November 2008, the Indian government amended its Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA) to make evidence collected through intercepted communications admissible in court, even though ‘the experience with the Parliament attack’ of 2001 had shown that ‘electronic evidence was susceptible to tampering’.
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