Terrorists move to Skype, frustrate eavesdroppers

NEW DELHI: Terrorist organizations targeting India have moved their communications significantly to Internet and other possible innovative means, denying Indian intelligence agencies any major breakthrough yet in their post-Mumbai blasts investigations.

Intelligence agencies have been carrying out intense sweeping of various communication means, especially mobile and satellite networks to see if there are any suspicious phone calls, and any possible contacts between individuals in India and their contacts in Pakistan. It is a standard practice, one which has paid them rich dividends in most investigations in the past.

But this time around, agencies are finding an unusual silence, and almost no contacts across the border. This despite significant upgrade in the eavesdropping capabilities of most agencies in recent times, especially that of Research and Analysis Wing, Intelligence Bureau and NTRO ( National Technical Research Organisation).

A senior intelligence officer said they had for sometime now been suspecting that the terrorists had moved their communications to Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), a communication technology that helps delivery of voice and multimedia data over Internet.

A senior Army officer said they were getting credible inputs in recent times that Kashmiri terrorists were being provided smart phones from which calls could be made using Skype, the popular Internet VoIP site. Though they haven't yet recovered any such Skype phones, Army found that communications over mobile and Thuraya satellite phones had mostly dried up, he said.

Ever since Indian agencies exhibited that they could easily listen in on radio sets of terrorist groups, they had moved on to satellite phones for their contacts across the border. Indian agencies took sometime to figure out how to listen in on satellite phones, mostly supplied by Thuraya. In recent years, this provided Indian intelligence agencies a wealth of data, and several real time updates on terrorists targeting India.

Now that terrorists have moved to VoIP communications, the Army officer admitted that they would have to figure out "foolproof methods" to monitor communications between India and Pakistan.

A senior officer with one of the intelligence agencies doing technical monitoring said the volume of Internet data in and out of India was so huge that none of the agencies had the manpower to do real time monitoring. "It is a major challenge, a really tough one," he said.

In many bomb blast cases in the past, the key breakthroughs came via intercepted phone calls. During the November 2008 Mumbai attacks, agencies were able to intercept phone conversations between terrorists in Mumbai and their handlers in Karachi that proved their cross-border links and helped investigators complete the narrative. In the case of the 2006 train bomb blasts, the agencies were able to pick up a significant phone call to the Bihar-Nepal border, but it was ignored as the local police built up a fantastical story at the cost of real investigation.

In several other terrorist attacks too, technical intelligence helped Indian investigators achieve breakthrough. Many fear that may have moved into a tougher regime now.