Alarmed by growing instances of telecom-related and cyber crimes, a high powered inter-ministerial committee, headed by the department of telecommunications (DoT) secretary, has recommended setting up of an integrated satellite surveillance and CCTV-based surveillance network in sensitive areas. This is in order to enhance both internal and external security of the country.
The network will be built under the public-private partnership, with active cooperation from private telecom operators.
The network will use advance image analysis algorithms for spotting suspicious people or images. It would give its inputs to a proposed nationwide surveillance grid, which will use information technology to see, hear, smell and make sense of information received from various distributed intelligence systems.
It would also use location-based service applications, combined with GIS mapping data that can make information about crime available in real time to police and other security personnel on their handheld devices.
As reported by FE earlier, the overall cost of setting up the national surveillance grid will be Rs 500 crore over the next five years. Of this Rs 400 crore will be come from the government and the balance will be contributed by the industry.
Underlying the need for setting up such a network, the committee has noted that, ?there is a need for development of computational approaches using artificial intelligence techniques, biometric devices, crypt analysis, voice recognition technologies, grid surveillance, encryption /decryption, mining data bases etc for security of the telecom and data networks and to provide useful inputs to the national security agencies. The prolific use of the telecom infrastructure by the undesirable social elements has been their primary means to get their messages across and act in unison. State-of-the-art technologies are being used in varying degrees by the developed countries to take proactive actions against the undesirable elements and minimize the security hazards?.
In the present set up, there is lot of duplication with different law enforcement agencies having their own processes with limitation to share the information with other authorities. This results in a major void in tracking undesirable activities.