Communication intelligence is the acquisition of a communication between two parties without their knowledge by a third party which may have a stake in that communication. Rama as a king going out at night to listen to what his subjects had to say about his rule and his overhearing a dhobi slandering Sita about her captivity by Ravana was a case of communication intelligence. Arabian Nights has stories of sultans going round the streets to listen in stealth to the opinions of citizens. According to Chanakya, a ruler must keep in touch with the views of his subjects through his spies overhearing the subjects' uninhibited conversation among themselves.
The modern history of communication intelligence starts with the Boer War where the British used radios for communication for the first time. An outstanding achievement of communication interception was when in 1917 the British intercepted and published the Zimmermann telegram from the Imperial German Foreign Minister to their Mexican ambassador asking the Mexican president to join Germany in the forthcoming war with the US. The publication of the telegram compelled the US to enter the war on the side of Britain and its allies.
Just before the outbreak of World War II, the German cryptographic machine fell into British hands. The British were able to break the German code and read all German radio signals. It was kept such a top secret that when information was available in advance that Coventry was going to be bombed heavily, Churchill refused to pass on the warning on the ground that safeguarding the secrecy of codebreaking was more crucial for winning the war. Similarly, Japanese codes were also broken by the US ahead of the outbreak of war with Japan and President Roosevelt and General George Marshall knew about the Japanese decision to declare war before the Japanese ambassador handed the declaration. Their communication to Pearl Harbour authorities did not reach in time. When candidate Tom Dewey was about to make it an election issue in the 1944 presidential election Marshall persuaded him from doing so in the name of national security. The victory of the allies in World War II was to a significant extent due to their outstanding success in communication intelligence.
Consequently, the US and UK have kept up their signal intelligence cooperation ever since. They have also the cooperation of Canada, Australia and New Zealand. They have a shared communication intelligence system called ECHELON. Its capabilities are suspected to include the ability to monitor a large proportion of the world's transmitted civilian telephone, fax and data traffic, according to a December 16, 2005 article in The New York Times. Some critics claim the system is being used not only to search for terrorist plots, drug dealers' plans, and political and diplomatic intelligence but also for large-scale commercial theft, international economic espionage and invasion of privacy.
Since World War II, both in the US and the UK, intelligence agencies concluded an agreement with telephone and telegraph companies that all overseas communications would be made available to them. This has worked so far and the issue of privacy had not become an issue in those countries. It was by monitoring one of the overseas cables that the assassin of Martin Luther King was apprehended. In the US, the National Security Agency is today the biggest intelligence organisation. The NSA was created by legislation in 1952 and was tasked to acquire foreign intelligence while the FBI was to monitor internal communication intelligence under strict supervision of the courts. After 9/11, it was found that because of compartmentalisation intelligence that should have been shared was not done resulting in the intelligence failure. Thus, a Director of National Intelligence has been created to coordinate all intelligence agencies. The NSA has an arrangement with all US computer manufacturers that they will not sell any equipment which will give an encryption capability that cannot be decrypted by the organisation in a short period.
In India, signal intelligence was done by the Intelligence Bureau in a rudimentary form up to 1963, when the army established the Signals Intelligence Directorate in the aftermath of the 1962 war. When R&AW was established it developed a wing for signal intelligence. In spite of its meagre resources, its outstanding achievement was the taping of the telephone conversation of General Musharraf in Beijing and his chief of general staff, General Aziz, in Islamabad during the Kargil war exposing the Pakistani army's role. The Kargil Committee emphasised the role of signal intelligence for national security and recommended a separate dedicated intelligence organisation for the purpose of the country putting in its optimum effort. This was accepted by the group of ministers of the NDA government and the National Technical Research Organisation was established in 2004 and the R&AW section dealing with signal intelligence was the core around which the new organisation was developed. Its most spectacular achievement was recording the conversation between the 26/11 terrorists and their handlers in Pakistan. Without that signal intelligence neither India nor the US could have nailed the Pakistani lies and compelled Pakistan to acknowledge the origin of the terrorists in Pakistan.
As in all organisations at the stage of incipient development there are turf battles and seniority and promotion grievances in the NTRO too. Disgruntled people would leak information, as in this case, partly correct and partly distorted. Just now there is a case of an NSA person undergoing trial in the US for sharing information with the media. The NTRO's role requires it to monitor specific communication links as well as carrying out general sweeps which would reveal new security targets which will have to be focussed on. Such general sweeps may record telephone conversations of innocent, law-abiding citizens. Abuse of the facility to snoop on political opponents is in the same category as abusing the police or administration for political purposes. The common man is as much interested in preventing the abuse of privacy as he is in eliminating the abuse of the police and administration by our politicians or of parliamentary procedures. Terrorists, military establishments of potentially hostile countries, drugs and arms smugglers, money launderers, organised crime bosses and their political and bureaucratic contacts would like to weaken this valuable tool of intelligence.
Mature democracies have found an optimum between the imperative of signal intelligence in this information age and the norms of privacy and civil liberty. But mature democracies do not also abuse their police, administration and parliamentary procedures. Can we expect our parliamentarians to achieve an all-party consensus on the norms for use of signal intelligence when they are unable to do so in ensuring the smooth, unhindered and dignified conduct of our parliamentary proceedings?
The writer is a senior defence analyst
express@expressindia.com
