India lacks organised infrastructure to create assets in cyber space
Bengaluru: India’s Intelligence apparatus in cracking cyber terrorism is severely lacking despite the growing threat of terrorism in the formidable cyber space. The cross-country arrests of alleged Daesh sympathisers by the National Investigation Agency (NIA) early this year were reportedly orchestrated on the inputs shared by the US investigation agencies – the Central Investigation Agency (CIA) and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) with India’s spy and investigation agencies – the Intelligence Bureau (IB) and the NIA, sources told Deccan Chronicle.
It is widely known that Daesh recruitment and propaganda rests on its online infiltration in covert social media platforms including the Dark Net. From the first Daesh related arrest; of Mehdi Masroor Biswas, an alleged cheerleader of the banned global jihadi organisation in Bengaluru in December 2014 to the recent arrests of around 25 alleged Daesh sympathisers, the inputs of their online recruitment and radicalisation were allegedly shared by the US agencies.
They not only have a massive dedicated wing for preventing and monitoring cyber terrorism, they have also set up decoys, who pose as cyber terrorists and paedophiles in the deep web of cyber terrorism and crime to create assets in the enemy field and source inputs from the real players.
“India neither has the expertise nor an organised infrastructure to create assets in the cyber space. They (the CIA and FBI) constantly filter the traffic on the Internet through software and their dedicated team of secret agents, who disguise themselves as terrorists on the Net and gather critical information from across the world. Moreover, the software giants such as Google, Facebook and Twitter have their servers in the US and cooperate with the federal investigation and spy agencies in their counter-terrorism operations ,” said a noted cyber lawyer in the Supreme Court and an international arbitrator, Neeraj Aarora. He said that Dark Net is the biggest threat in the cyber space in which data is encrypted and moves from one mode to the other without revealing the source.
