India’s internal intelligence agency, The Intelligence Bureau (IB) wants all mobile phone companies to store call data records, or details of all phone calls made by their customers, for a period of five years. At present, telecommunication companies (telcos) store call records only for six months.
IB had earlier asked the telecom department to mandate Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to keep a record of all online activities of customers for a minimum of six months. But so far this has not be implemented.
[advt]The home ministry, in a communication to the telecom ministry, acknowledged that so far all efforts to get telcos save call records for more than one year had met with stiff resistance due to the increased costs. But, the communication adds the sector regulator TRAI, which plans to analyse the call records for calculating the liability of telcos, would be looking at call records between November 2005 and March 2009, indicating that such details were available with all mobile phone companies.
Last month, the telecom department turned down a demand by intelligence agencies that all operators upgrade their infrastructure to tap the phones of at least 1% of their customers.[source]
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