It is the same old story that the Indian government is repeating for last two years. It has asked the department of telecommunications (DoT) to direct all the telecom service providers to upgrade their software to intercept websites such as Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube that use web 2.0 technology.

Recently, the social media sites such as Facebook and twitter were used by the anti national elements to spread rumors in many cities in the country following riots in Assam. The government took three days to act and by that then the damage was done.

In a recent note to the DoT, Intelligence Bureau has written: “Telecom service providers (TSPs), presently, do not have adequate lawful interception facilities for full reconstruction of web intercepts for various sites using web 2.0 technology like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Picasa etc. and quality of reconstruction of captured data is not good.”

The IB note further adds: "DoT is requested to instruct all the TSPs to upgrade their lawful interception infrastructure\software in the monitoring systems to handle web 2.0 traffic for better reconstruction at the earliest."