Provide mobile internet subscriber details to security agencies: DoT

DoT has asked telecom operators Idea Cellular and Vodafone to provide the Intelligence Bureau (IB) with identification of subscribers using internet on their mobile phones.

According to DoT officials instructions had been issued to Idea and Vodafone to provide the requisite information to IB at the earliest.

The security agency had sought details of certain mobile numbers by providing the corresponding IP addresses to Vodafone but the telecom operator had failed to respond.

Meanwhile, other operators have also been instructed to have a suitable mechanism in place that would allow the security agencies to uniquely identify individual users based on the information they provided.

The security agencies have been asking the operators for a long time to set up a system that would allow identification of individual user based on the information of IP address, date and time.

IB had earlier also earlier objected to mobile operators using network address translation device that allowed a single IP address to be used for many connections.

According to IB, in the absence of user-identifying logging mechanism at the NAT, despite IP address, date and time stamps, service providers were unable to pinpoint the exact target of a particular communication over the internet.