How India’s Netra can revolutionize Internet Surveillance

With an aim to further strengthen their intelligence interception capabilities, the Intelligence Bureau and the Cabinet Secretariat are in the process of testing “Netra”, India’s very own Internet driven surveillance system. This surveillance system is likely to be capable enough to scrutinize any doubtful voice traffic coming through popular communication applications such as Skype of Google Talk.

NETRA (NEtwork TRaffic Analysis) is a software network developed by India's Centre for Artificial Intelligence and Robotics (CAIR), a Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) laboratory, and is used by the Intelligence Bureau, India's domestic intelligence agency, and the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) in order to intercept and analyse internet traffic using pre-defined filters.

It may be recalled that the need for such a system came into existence when India’s security agencies found it very difficult to intercept and monitor Internet data on a real time basis. And hence, they started looking towards building a system that could monitor Internet traffic on a real time basis due to the rapidly escalating threat posed by terrorist and criminal elements using data communication, which had brought service providers like BlackBerry, Skype and Gmail into the focus of law enforcement agencies.

Analyzing the internet traffic, NETRA can decipher voice traffic passing through communication applications such as Skype and Google Talk, and intercept messages with keywords such as 'attack', 'bomb', 'blast' or 'kill' in real-time from the enormous number of tweets, status updates, emails, instant messaging transcripts, internet calls, blogs, forums and even images generated on the internet to obtain the desired intelligence.

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