This has prompted an upgrade in security and other measures to prevent hacking. “This is nothing surprising. Both sides do it,” a senior police officer told The Indian Express. “Anything that goes out can be intercepted and we are alive to that fact. We do take adequate measures to prevent such intrusions.”
After tech-savvy Omar Abdullah took over as Chief Minister, he has been promoting the use of information technology with an aim to speed up government functioning. Sources reveal Abdullah has been seeking reports through emails. In fact, the mode of delivery of the daily confidential police bulletin prepared by the Special Branch for the Chief Minister too has been changed from traditional human courier to email.
With technology becoming the latest battleground between militants and the security agencies, there is a consistent effort from each side to outsmart the other. In fact, the ban on the pre-paid cell phones had this internal competition within the security establishment at the core of it. The records with the police here suggest that more than 90 per cent information regarding the movement and hideouts of the militants in last five years was generated electronically, leading to the highest-ever success rate for counter-insurgency operations. The recent successful operation to trace the two fidayeens who were holed up in a hotel in Srinagar’s Lal Chowk too was “hugely supported by the mobile surveillance”.
The surveillance teams of the police not only traced the exact location of the militants but established their identity, their allegiance etc by listening to their conversations. The militants, too, are aware of the precision of the phone surveillance. During a recent encounter between police and militants in a Pulwama village, the police had encircled a lone militant in a residential house. To mislead the police regarding the number of militants inside the building, the militant used three different phones and started calling from his one number to another. This did confuse the surveillance team, which suggested the presence of more than one militant inside the cordon.
Similarly, sources reveal that in a bid to avoid the interception of the email communication by the security agencies, militants would not communicate between two email addresses but use a single address with several people knowing the password. “The militant would save the document in the draft which would be subsequently read by his contacts who would open that particular email only,” a source said.
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