Implementing national security requirements cannot be solely dependent on a decision process that emerges as a result of public dialog or operators' choice/consensus or through directions to implement a felt need (as is currently taking place for filtering of social network contents). What needs to be done for national security, just needs to be done through a diligent technical process.
With the nature of lawful monitoring requirements moving from structured content (signaling, phone records) to unstructured content (web pages, emails, IM conversations), centralized deployment needs to be necessarily supported with massive data storage for analysis. Since most IP based communications involve a mix of talking, chatting, and email, it is important to put together conversation threads with mobile phone locations that provide details of relationships in context.
Regulating the Unregulated Data
In India, mobile users are using social media on regulated communications infrastructure hosting the largely unregulated internet, resulting in a rapid proliferation of mobile data. No traditional database and analysis solutions can cope with either the rate or aggregate size of these data feeds. Consequently, the only option is to adapt technologies from the social networking and web search worlds to the 'big data' industry.
With the increasing use in India of mobile phones for net based communications using Wi-Fi, 3G, and now 4G-both of voice and data, new security implications have come into play. Hence it has become necessary to monitor social networks as also to locate a mobile user when necessary, a fact that the Indian Government has now shown concern about.
Fixing the Loopholes: Security Concerns
Existing network deployment enables mobile operators to provide location details of their subscriber based on BTS to which the user's mobile phone is connected. Following 9/11 and the growing use of VoIP, the US Government mandated deployment of accuracy of location solution over their wireless service providers' network so that in an emergency situation the caller could be located-what has since come to be known as FCC E911 rules.
After 26/11 happenings at Mumbai, India started a dialogue with all the mobile operators for improving the accuracy of location of the mobile users. From May 31, 2011, Department of Telecom (DoT) has made an amendment to the operators' licenses, where it has become mandatory for all the operators to deploy an accuracy of location solution on their network. This amendment should enable security agencies to accurately establish location of the targeted mobile users and thereafter of all the mobile users on their network. As per the existing regulations for deploying lawful monitoring solutions, once again DoT has passed the responsibility of deploying such an accuracy of location solution on the mobile operators. Over the last decade, technology has advanced rapidly, and monitoring of voice calls can today be done more cost-effectively and efficiently by using a centralized platform.
Deployment of various location platforms by each operator as desired now by DoT, could lead to the same chaos that is being experienced today by the security agencies for coordination of voice calls from various lawful monitoring platforms deployed by India's 15 mobile operators based on a practice that began in 2002. Location platform deployment based on an uniform technology working across all the operators' networks, could lead to ease of establishing a target's coordinates in real-time for the security agencies and provide commercial benefits to each operator.
Analyzing Location Methods
Although there are various technical options available to establish accuracy of location over any wireless operator's network (as given in the box), but no one technology is the solution that can fit in all situational needs. GPS and traditional LBS does not scale up to monitor the entire network. In these circumstances, to make the whole exercise fruitful for the security agencies, a combination of technical solutions for location needs to be deployed over each operator's network.
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