The Minister directed Chairman PTA to revisit the whole system and ensure that all those illegal SIMS which are being used on stolen identity shall be blocked.
The meeting decided that in view of the grave complaints, Mobile Number Portability (MNP) by the service providers is banned in future and anybody found violating should be booked under Anti-Terrorism Act, 1997 as it is against the national security.
Anybody misusing, sending threatening emails or tampering with email address, mobile phone via SMS, MMS etc shall be dealt with under ATA and other relevant sections of law.

News report.

Now India wants the ability to listen into every conversation/text/email exchange on every Blackberry in their territory. If only the security people are listening. But we all know that all sorts of other people will get access to this information too. Field day for the other kinds of spooks.

The best defense against terrorists is wealth. If more people have it, there’d be fewer people willing to become terrorists in the long term. If there is more wealth, governments will also have more resources and can afford to replace things like the WWII rifles used by Indian law enforcement in 26/11.

Few doubt that India has valid security concerns. In recent years, attacks against India have included the use of sophisticated communications technology — as when the terrorists who stormed Mumbai two years ago communicated with their Pakistani handlers by satellite phone and the Internet. Or when Chinese hackers infiltrated India’s military computer networks this year.

But critics say that India’s security efforts, which they describe as clumsy, may do little to protect the country, even as they intrude on the privacy of companies and citizens alike.

“They will do damage by blocking highly visible systems like BlackBerry or Skype,” said Ajay Shah, a Mumbai-based economist who writes extensively about technology. “This will shift users to less visible and known platforms. Terrorists will make merry doing crypto anyway. A zillion tools for this are freely available.”

Full story.

The Chinese government on Wednesday began to require cellphone users to furnish identification when buying SIM cards, a move officials cast as an effort to rein in burgeoning cellphone spam, pornography and fraud schemes.

The requirement, which has been in the works for years, is not unlike rules in many developed nations that ask users to present credit card data or other proof of identification to buy cellphone numbers. The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology said that about 40 percent of China’s 800 million cellphone users were currently unidentified. Those users will be ordered to furnish identification by 2013 or lose their service, according to The Global Times, a state-run newspaper.

The police official, Javed Shamim, said both men were in Calcutta in October when Mr. Rehman used a dead relative’s photo identification to buy the SIM cards. Mr. Rehman then activated them and either gave or sold them to Mr. Ahmed, Mr. Shamim said. He emphasized that no definitive links to the attacks in Mumbai had been established by the police.

Rakesh Maria, a joint commissioner with the Mumbai police, said Friday that the police had recovered seven cellphones, in addition to three Global Positioning System handsets and one satellite phone, all of which they believed the terrorists had used.

The police have said that 10 terrorists carried out the attacks on luxury hotels and several other locations that began on Nov. 26, and that all of them came from Pakistan. This was the first sign that the attackers may have had help from Indian citizens.

Note that the proper identification documents had been submitted to get the SIMs, but they were of a dead person. No findings yet on who ordered the satphones and whether the bills were paid on those accounts.

Mr. Muzammil, who is the right-hand man to Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakvhi, the operational commander of the group, talked by satellite phone to the attackers from Pakistan when the gunmen were in the Taj and Oberoi hotels, the Western official said.

The attackers also used the cellphones of people they killed to call back to Mr. Muzammil somewhere in Pakistan, the official said.

One use is clear: they killed people; took their mobiles and called the mastermind of LeT back in Pakistan. Nothing we can do about this, realistically.

The other is not as clear. So Muzammil uses a satphone in Pakistan. How does he talk to the cannon fodder? Did they carry satphones? If yes, why did they have to use the mobiles of the people they killed (saving money is not an issue when you are on a suicide mission)? If the raiders did not have satphones, did Muzammil call them through the Taj exchange (I am basing this question on the report that some of these murderers booked a room at the Taj and stayed for several days)?

Can someone shed light on these questions please?

As usual, media is blamed for their role in Mumbai. Unconfirmed reports claimed the terrorists trapped in Taj Mahal Palace constantly watched TV for news and they might have got a feeling of excitement if not ideas from the live coverage. Stupid guys. They never knew what they missed. The best ball-by-ball coverage was hardly on TV but on Twitter, anybody could have accessed thru a mobile. (Twitter added hashtags to terms like ‘Mumbai’ and ‘Attack’) Indian government at one stage requested ‘Twitters’ not to tweet anything about police activity, but it was more because the mainstream media too started depending on them rather than their own paid correspondents.

However, unlike in case of 9/11 no mobile based interactions with the victims were heard – which was bit surprising given the increasing mobile use in India.

There were also reports that the terrorists accessed British news sites using Black Berries. Well, on second thoughts, they might even have had a quick look at tweets – before being gunned down.