New Delhi:
With a controversial surveillance programme by the US leading to a global outrage, India too now has acquired the ability to analyse meta data, but not content, carried over the Internet. The new system will look for unusual data flow to identify and access cyber threats and not individual data.
Source told NDTV that any fears of invasion of individual privacy through internet should be discounted.
The national cyber security policy unveiled by the government this past week will ensure that critical Information Technology infrastructure in the country is strengthened to prevent increasing cyber-attacks from across the globe.
The policy is a part of the new cyber security architecture, which was unveiled by the government over the past one week.
However, unlike the US' surveillance programme PRISM, sources say India's surveillance system is not aimed at collecting individual data but is intended only to assess threats to India's cyber universe. (
10 things to know about PRISM)
While the Department of Electronics and IT will be the nodal ministry, other stakeholders like Ministry of Defence, National Technical Research Organisation (NTRO) and Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) will also play major roles in implementing this policy. A national cyber coordination centre will be coming up soon.
While, the National Security Council Secretariat would coordinate, oversee and ensure compliance of the policy, the government hopes to rope in the private sector in a major way to ensure there is no date theft or attack on critical infrastructure.
The policy aims to create a secure computing environment and enable adequate trust and confidence in electronic transactions. The government has reportedly begun exercises like mock drills of a national cyber security crisis.
The US' PRISM has led to a global outrage after a newspaper revealed the country's National Security Agency has been conducting secret surveillance on Web users around the world. The US program reportedly gathers hundreds of millions of US phone records to search for possible links to known terrorist targets abroad. It also allows the USA government to tap into nine US Internet companies, including Google, Apple, Facebook and Skype and gather all communications to detect suspicious behaviour that begins overseas.