On 26/11 Anniversary, Some Thoughts on How to Avoid a Repeat

Intelligence and security bodies must keep keep pace with innovative terrorist groups to avoid surprises like 26/11.

We need to keep certain ground realities in mind on the 7th anniversary of 26/11. Paris 13/11 attacks have proved that even advanced countries could fail in taking normal preventive steps, like access control, to avoid terrorist strikes. This negligence has cost them very dearly despite France’s Interior Minister, Bernard Cazeneuve, claiming earlier this year that 400 terrorists were being tracked in the aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo attacks.

Secondly, we need to recognise that technical agencies churn out a huge volume of intercepted data. After 26/11 we have also been setting up Western models of technical collection. In 2007 Mike McConnell, the former US Director of National Intelligence, revealed that 16 US agencies collected 1 billion pieces of intelligence daily. The volume will be much more now with the new emphasis by the US National Security Agency (NSA) on “High Volume Identifiers” in tracking thousands of people, places, and events connected to each other. However, this too is far beyond the agencies’ interpretation capability.

Simultaneously, a wrong impression is growing among “cyber” specialists, police and intelligence officers in India and abroad that conventional policing and intelligence work has become redundant. Our political leadership also conveys this message as they want to appear to be technology oriented. This partly arose out of ISIS’s spectacular success in attracting “online” recruits through better visuals. Intelligence operators all over the world feel that they could sit in comfortable offices and dig into the “Black Web” to extract intelligence or operate their “drones” rather than chasing human spies on hostile terrain.

Perhaps none of them had read a report in Washington Post quoting the Department of Homeland Security that drone surveillance on their borders was “largely ineffective”. The Intercept, an investigative journal, had quoted secret documents on October 15, 2015 from the Pentagon’s Intelligence Surveillance & Reconnaissance Task Force saying that the Drone campaign “suffers from an over reliance on signals intelligence and an apparently incalculable civilian toll” resulting in loss of reliable intelligence.

Now global cyber experts are suspecting that the 13/11 terrorists might have evaded surveillance by using “undetectable coded messages on a Play Station 4”. The report said that the communicated words could mean something else, known only to “tight terrorist cells” that cannot be detected by common software filtering.

What India Must Do

Could our normally static-thinking intelligence agencies and rule-bound police across our states and union territories keep pace with this type of highly kaleidoscopic innovation and deceit by terrorist organisations?

One example is enough. No Central agency had warned our police departments that terrorists could effect subterfuge in communication through Voice over Internet Protocol (VOIP) as was done in 26/11. Our Central agencies, who should have kept their eyes and ears open (They are paid for that), did not perhaps know that VOIP was extensively used since 2004 for commercial communications in advanced countries. The ISI or their LeT moles abroad knew about it and used it successfully for two way terrorist-control communications, leaving the Mumbai police flummoxed. It took a long time for us to decipher what was happening as the terrorists had foreign- registered cellphone numbers.

One reason for this situation is because innovation and originality are never appreciated by hierarchically-driven bureaucracies. That was the reason why the Indira Gandhi government made a special provision to make lateral recruitment of outside talents, especially the kind that was not ordinarily available within government, when our external intelligence agency was set up in 1968. However over a period of time the Central government’s personnel policies have made this rule a dead letter. It should be noted that in 1999 the US Senate Intelligence Committee had to intervene to upgrade a technically stagnant NSA’s technical collection capability by constituting a Technical Advisory Group and recruiting a large number of young IT professionals, disregarding government rules.

We need to do something like this to ensure that any further surprises like 26/11 are prevented. We should hold the National Technical Research Organisation solely responsible for all technical tracking and innovation instead of overburdening the state police departments by creating parallel technical agencies. We should hold our national intelligence agencies answerable for all India terrorist related intelligence, leaving only local efforts of physical prevention, detection and investigation with the 29 state police forces.

(The writer is a former Special Secretary, Cabinet Secretariat, and also member of the High Level Committee which enquired into the police performance during 26/11 Mumbai.)