New Delhi:
The Union Home Ministry plans an ambitious project to arm every state with a cyber police station, a specialized cyber forensic unit and a cyber-training unit. People assigned to these will patrol cyberspace, investigate where inflammatory material is springing from on the Internet and then will act against troublemakers along with central agencies like the Director General of Computer Emergency Reaction Team (DGCERT).
A three-day meeting of the country's top cops began today and the first day's proceedings were dominated by discussions on how the security infrastructure was caught off-guard recently when threat messages and morphed pictures went viral on the Internet and on MMS causing panic in the north-eastern community in cities like Bangalore and Pune after the Assam ethnic clashes last month.
The conference is hosted by the Intelligence Bureau (IB) and has in attendance the Director Generals of Police from all states. It is a platform that discusses and proposes responses to key internal security issues.
Addressing the conference, Home Minister Sushil Kumar Shinde said that terrorists are increasingly using cyberspace in their plots and that the recent incidents in Bengaluru and Pune show how motivated rumours and irresponsible use of social media poses a new challenge. Cyberspace , he said, besides providing a "pervasive infrastructure for discreet communication," can also help spread a "distorted version of reality".
The Director General of Intelligence Bureau (IB) Nehchal Sandhu said the agency had taken up with the US, the issue of social networking sites with servers in that country being used for rumour mongering and the posting of inflammatory material on the Internet.
Such cases presented a strong case for the police to "develop capacity, not just to keep track of postings on the net to identify those responsible for them.
Referring to the recent arrest of 18 young men from Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh and Maharashtra for allegedly planning terror strikes, Mr Sandhu said, "the ongoing investigation in Bangalore shows the vulnerability of our youth and that they can be exploited by radical elements within India and abroad to create closed communities of select subverted individuals that can drive them as per their desires."
The Bangalore police, which carried out the arrests, claim that young men accessed Jehadi material on the Internet. The ongoing investigation, Mr Sandhu said, showed that there "can be no standard template for detection of the virus of radicalism as it travels across the sections of society."