Tech-challenged police in India’s IT city

Bengaluru: It would be laughable if it was not such a serious matter. The IT City was blissfully unaware while Mehdi Masroor Biswas tweeted his support for the Islamic State (IS) waging a horrific war in Iraq and Syria, from the not so remote suburb of Jalahalli.  Despite his huge following online, the bespectacled and quiet 24- year-old went undetected with neither the police nor the intelligence agencies picking up on his whereabouts for all the time that he operated .

Though the city police did nab him after the handler of the Twitter account, @shamiwitness was unmasked by a British news channel, the question is why could it not track him earlier.
When confronted at a press conference held to announce the arrest of Mehdi, city police commissioner M.N. Reddi wiggled out of the awkward question saying anyone could post anything online from any corner of the world.

“There is a system in place which allows Central agencies to track such things. Importantly, Mehdi’s posts were nothing to do with Bengaluru or Karnataka, or even India for that matter. That is probably why he was not under our radar,” he said.

Other senior police officials say by and large whatever inputs they get on terrorism is provided by Central intelligence agencies. Then what does the state intelligence wing do? Apparently  not much as “it is not as well equipped as the Central agencies.”
“The Intelligence Bureau, Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) and the National Investigation Agency (NIA) have state-of-the-art facilities to track terrorists who are active online. They have experts to look into this. But the state intelligence wing has no such facility or specially trained staff,” says an official.

A while ago the state had set up the Internal Security Division (ISD) with jurisdiction over an Anti-Terrorist Cell. But this too does not monitor social networking sites on a regular basis.

An inspector of the Cyber Crime police reveals that they investigate only the cases that are registered with them and help the police if they seek them out for information. “There is no mechanism to keep  tabs on anti-national or terror activity on social networking sites,” he admits.