Indian Government wants access to Monitor Facebook,Twitter

The government on Wednesday made it clear that social networking sites must comply with the security agencies’ requirement for a real-time monitoring of their user data to ensure that national security is not compromised.

India’s communications ministry has been asked by the home ministry to monitor social networking websites such as Twitter and Facebook amid fears that the services are being used by terrorists to plan attacks.
The request suggests that the Indian government is trying to broaden the scope of its online surveillance for national security. Telecommunications service providers in India provide facilities for lawful interception and monitoring of communications on their network, including communications from social networking websites such as Facebook and Twitter, in accordance with their license agreements, Milind Deora, the minister of state for communications and IT, told Parliament, according to the country’s Press Information Bureau.
The government had earlier asked Canadian firm Research in Motion, which provides BlackBerry services, to hand over an interception solution for its BlackBerry Internet Services (BIS), BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) and BlackBerry Enterprise Servers (BES) over security concerns that terrorists may use these services, since the data is highly encrypted and security agencies can’t monitor such services.