The fact that High Tech crime has surely penetrated the halls of the intelligence agencies in India can be gauged from these recent happenings that have surprisingly not generated as much heat as they should ideally have. What is most disturbing is that the units under scrutiny are the ones that are meant to prevent such incidents from happening in the first place and the entire nations security depends on their probity.

Brigadier Ujjwal Dasgupta's residence was raided and his files and computer seized. Ujjwal who is RAW’s Director for Computers and Training is asked not to return to work.

S. S. Paul, computer systems analyst in the National Security Council Secretariat is arrested and his residence raided.

Mukesh Saini, a navy commander who headed the National Information Security Co-ordination Cell is under scrutiny. Saini, also the Indian coordinator of the Indo-US Cyber Security Forum is being implicated for leaking information to his US counterparts.

The US side of the operations was apparently headed by the Third Secretary in the US Embassy, Rosanne Minchew who was also associated with the Indo-US Cyber Crime forum. Minchew is understood to be on leave and has left India a few weeks ago. The US embassy, has refused to comment on the matter.

With the recent bomb blasts in Mumbai and the recurring incidents of violence all over the country, analysts are crying foul over intelligence failure. How much of this failure in intelligence is due to the failure of the Intelligence agencies themselves remains to be seen.

That espionage is part and parcel of the functioning of world governments is a known fact but it is a matter of deep concern and embarrassment for Indian authorities that an organisation for strategic Indo-US partnership has been successfully used as a cover for a spy ring. One cannot help but wonder how much supposedly "friendly nations" can be trusted in their overtures of friendship given these happenings. In the not too distant past, RAW’s Joint Director Rabinder Singh who was under watch for allegedly spying for the US fled the country, in May 2004, and is now believed to be in the US.

Considering that computers have been used to copy and forward sensitive data and that Pen drives, the nightmare of any security professional have been used to copy large quantities of data off the secretariat computers secretly, I would personally like to see the IT act used for once. Of course the fact that pen drives are allowed into these organizations and are usable the way they have been, points to a severe failure in the functioning policies of these organization.

While analyzing all these incidents, I cannot but comment on the "wisdom" of our law makers when they introduce a draft broadcast bill that contains clauses to muzzle the press against "reports implicating friendly nations". We can only wonder if such laws are meant to contain incidents like these for the sake of the greater partnership.

Sriramkrishnan Srinivasan

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