New Delhi:
The government, often attacked by the opposition for making private phone conversations its business, has decided to rewrite the rules for how phones will be tapped.
Currently, the permission to tap a phone is granted by the Union Home Secretary in Delhi, and by the Home Department's Secretary in states. A phone can be tapped for a month at a time.
But for special cases, intelligence and enforcement agencies can tap a phone for upto a week without any clearance from the Home Ministry.
Those discretionary powers will be curtailed with changes to the relevant sections of the Telegraph Act.
A new Central Monitoring System or CMS is being set up in Delhi and will swing into action within a month. It will be a part of the Department of Telecom and will be manned by the Intelligence Bureau (IB).
Requests for phone taps and clearances will be processed via the new system which will initiate the phone tap as soon as the permission is registered.
There will be no need for authorization letters to be shared with cellphone providers, currently a lengthy and disorganized process, difficult to mine for details.