Parimal Peeyush and K.S Narayanan report how the police and criminals play hide and seek with cell phones.
Ever since the mobile phone revolution swept across India, cops and sleuths have found the ubiquitous handset and the mobile towers to be a very handy tool in solving crimes of all types.This has been borne out by the manner in which the cops claim to have solved the two recent sensational cases involving liquor baron Ponty Chaddha and real estate tycoon cum erstwhile BSP leader Deepak Bharadwaj. Rapid advances in technology have turned an ordinary mobile phone into a potent tool not only for criminals, but also for law enforcement agencies.
The advent of technology in the past two decades has seen the world, including India, take a giant leap in the way that people communicate and share information. The Information, communication and technology revolution has seen mobile phones evolve from being a mere replacement to desk phones to a sophisticated modus operandi for criminals. Law enforcement agencies, as a result, are today faced with this persistent challenge of keeping pace with technology in order to check crime and maintain law and order.
Take the case of the Bharadwaj murder as an instance. Call records have helped the police establish how the murder plan was hatched and also revealed key conspirators. An analysis of the call detail records of the alleged conspirators in the Bhardwaj murder case point to a plan where the assailants tried to wipe off every trace of their movements. The conspirators communicated only through SMSes and would switch off their phones before heading out to meet either at a parking lot or outside a school in Vasant Kunj, next to the lawyer's residence, to avoid their locations from being tracked, police sources said. Each person in the chain of conspirators was looking out for himself and this precisely was the reason why lawyer Baljeet Singh Sehrawat recorded his conversations with Bhardwaj's younger son Nitesh Bharadwaj, who is the main accused in the case. Sources further revealed how Nitesh, Sehrawat and Swami Pratibhanand exchanged 45 calls till five days before the incident, beginning January 2012. Later, they changed their phones and SIM cards to prevent police from tracking the IMEI number.
Lets look at another high profile case that grabbed headlines in the recent past. Investigators looking into call records of Ponty Chadha and his brother to build the exact sequence of events that led to his and brother Hardeep Chadha's murders revealed that Hardeep had a close relationship with at least two ministers in the Sheila Dikshit cabinet. These ministers - Delhi's Urban Development Minister Arvinder Singh Lovely and power minister Haroon Yusuf - are said to have been in close contact with Hardeep. Lovely reportedly talked to Hardeep and exchanged text messages almost every day. Interestingly, between November 1 and November 17, the day the brothers fought bitterly leading to the final fatal shootout, Lovely and Hardeep talked to each other 59 times.
There is an endless list of how tracking mobile records and surveillance have helped investigators uncover hidden motives and establish crime.
In fact, the first action of the police investigating an unseen crime is to seek phone records from the telecom service provider. The service providers are mandated under law to provide access of call records to law enforcement agencies as and when required. There is a strict protocol that is followed which includes a request being sent by the law enforcement agency to the service provider after it is approved and signed by the Home Secretary. In a conversation with TSI, S N Shrivastava, Special Commissioner of Police, Special Cell, Delhi Police said, “The use of these technical tools is subject to its misuse. The mandate (to facilitate surveillance and tracking) that was given to the mobile service providers was that cell phones were being used for crime. Mobiles have become a powerful medium of communication between criminals.” He said that when a technology could be misused for destabilising law and order, any society had the right to keep such checks and balances in place. “Any surveillance or tapping that is done is under a law that is approved by Parliament. There are norms laid out that enlist the purposes for which surveillance can be done. These include national security, maintaining national integrity, public order and prevention of crime,” he added.
“There is a proper protocol in place when law enforcement agencies request operators to monitor somebody. Each request comes to a nodal officer that every operator designates for each circuit. The nodal officer then informs a close group of people who then provide the interface. This comes to our switching centre where the LEAs are already connected. So, whenever we get any request, all we do is route the information. The service provider does not get involved in overhearing, encrypting and decrypting,” Rajan Mathews, Director General of the Cellular Operators Association of India (COAI) told TSI.
While call records and mobile surveillance have come in handy during investigations, there is also a flip side to it. It is not just the police that are getting smarter; with the advent of technology, there have been several instances where law breakers have managed to outsmart law keepers. Even in the case of the Bharadwaj murder, sources reveal that the prime accused Nitesh never communicated with Pratibhanand directly. Instead, he was in touch with Sehrawat who in turn was in touch with Swami Pratibhanand. Nitesh and Sehrawat spoke only through SMSes and would plan the spot and time for the next meeting. All this was done with the intention of evading investigators.
Speaking to this magazine, Prakash Singh, a former Director General of Police, Uttar Pradesh, says that state at the forefront of tracking mobile calls to crack crime. “Many criminal gangs who unleashed terror in their neighbourhoods were eliminated by tracking mobiles. Technology is so sophisticated that one gets to know the exact location of a mobile, he says. However, Singh also cautions that criminals are invariably one step ahead of law enforcement agencies. “The police have to constantly upgrade their technology, coordination and intelligence to make arrest and breakthroughs. It is a useful tool. Nevertheless challenges continue to surmount,” he added. Dinesh Bhatt, a former senior police official currently serving as a member of the Uttarakhand Public Service Commission also believes that keeping abreast with technology is a big challenge. “But the new crop of police officials are doing a wonderful job,” he says, adding, “the young lot that we have today are well-versed with the use of complicated technologies and are committed to cracking crime with its help. It is all about adapting and implementing,” Bhatt says.
But today, checking crime by tracking mobiles is also becoming increasingly difficult. Assistant Commissioner of Police at Delhi Police's Special Cell Manish Chandra says that all criminals today know that the police uses telephone records and locations to nab them. “When a criminal knows how he is going to be caught, he will obviously take precautions for not getting caught. The basic aim is to evade arrest. Moreover, when a criminal is caught and sent to jail, he gets all the training that is required on how not to get caught,” says Chandra. The time spent in jail helps him understand the errors that he could make and once he is out, he is bound never to make those mistakes. “Criminals who are today getting caught with the use of mobile technology are either first timers or with a really low IQ,” Chandra added.
Things, however, were not so difficult earlier. There was a phase when technology was moving ahead and nabbing criminals with the help of telephones. “As on date, you take my word, you cannot catch a criminal only with the use of telephone records,” says Chandra, adding that the most essential and fundamental factor is human intelligence. It could be used later to establish a crime or conspiracy or motive. We are going to see an increase in the reliance upon human intelligence to catch criminals, he says. It can be source-based or through undercover operations of infiltration by the police. “In the past 8 to 10 years, the focus on human intelligence had taken a back seat. We found a tool in mobile technology where we could track, intercept and crack cases sitting in one place. Now, the criminals have overtaken us. More reliance needs to be put upon human intelligence,” Chandra emphasises.
The use of mobile surveillance or tracking during investigation, however, is not new. In fact, it has existed ever since mobile phones arrived in India. For the record, it was a condition for granting telecom licenses in 1995. There is a clear mandate that if a law enforcement agency requests interception of a particular subscriber, the service provider has to comply. Requests are made under the Indian Telegraph Act, 1911. Tracking of suspects has become a normal procedure in the course of investigation today. Be it crime, financial frauds such as the Nigerian 419 scam or tracking of terror outfits and their supporters, mobile tracking is common and has existed since as early as 1995 when the first tranche of telecom licences were given out in India. Since then, the police in various cities have been at it. This, say experts, has given criminals all the more reason to give mobiles a slip.
According to a senior official, all Pakistan-based militant outfits active in Kashmir have switched over from mobile phones and satellite phones, which are easy to track. Now, it is the Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) call that is coming very handy for ISI agents and terrorists operating from Pakistan and Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK). The mushrooming of unregistered VoIP or Internet telephony is becoming a huge security problem as the origin of the caller and time of call cannot be ascertained immediately. Central security agencies have been pressing Department of Telecom (DoT) to ask service providers to come up with a solution for which several rounds of meetings have taken place between the, the DoT and the National Technical Research Organisation (NTRO). However, no quick fix solution has been found to block unregistered VoIPs operating from outside the country's borders.
