Telcos, MHA and JK officials to meet on interception of VoIP

This follows a meeting Home Minister P Chidambaram had chaired here earlier this month. In the last meeting, all the service providers in the Valley were asked to ensure that communications taking place over their networks either through Voice Over Internet Protocol (VoIP) or on social networking sites should be available for monitoring by the security agencies, official sources said. Operators had assured the government that they were ready to hold a meeting in the Valley to address the security concerns after consulting their respective technical teams.

There are seven telecom players -- BSNL, Bharti airtel, Aircel, Idea, RCom, Tata Indicom and Vodafone-- operating in Jammu and Kashmir. These companies provide post-paid as well as pre-paid mobile services in the state. Chidambaram was briefed about security concerns resulting from unmonitored communications taking place over VoIP and through social networking sites, sources said. Security officials had expressed concerns over lack of real time monitoring of communication exchanges taking place on Internet and that telecom operators were not providing them real time data of these conversations which is a risk.

Security agencies have also alleged that they continued to face difficulties in monitoring the Web chat, especially on state-run BSNL, and there was no clear message from its technical team to address the concerns, sources said. During the meeting, which is scheduled to be held in Kashmir, operators would be providing with a solution for a real-time monitoring of the VoIP and other services available on Internet, sources added.