Govt starts monitoring of overseas phone calls, data $27 million spent to check grey trafficking on trial basis

The News 20 September 2013 ISLAMABAD: The government on Thursday installed and launched a monitoring system to curb illegal voice and data communications with the rest of the world. At an estimated cost of $27 million, this system possesses the capability to monitor all voice and data traffic coming in and going out of the country, identify and automatically mitigate the traffic which is deemed illegal or grey, it is learnt. The Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) are at the stage of preparation in consultation with the main spy agency of the country which will enable authorities concerned to monitor communications with the objective to identify grey trafficking and then stop it without conducting any raids on the premises of any illegal communication facilities. “Under International Clearing House (ICH) policy, the government has installed grey trafficking monitoring system by placing hundreds of equipments and software. This system has been operational now with an immediate effect and will help curb the illegal mode of communication, including through telephone calls and using internet facilities,” official sources confirmed to The News here on Thursday. When contacted, Minister of State for Information Technology Anusha Rehman said the system was installed on a trial basis at the PTA to assess whether this system could curb grey trafficking and after analysing the situation over the next two weeks, the government would decide the next line of action. A senior official of the PTA, when contacted, said that the grey trafficking monitoring system will analyse data on a regular basis and clear different claims about the exact volume of illegal or grey trafficking. “We will get data of a few days and then inform the authorities concerned about the trends existing in volume of grey trafficking coming in and going out from Pakistan,” said the PTA official. There are 14 LDIs, including PTCL, which have contributed an amount of $27 million to install this system under the jurisdiction of Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA). The sources said the government had deployed a state-of-the-art technical solution to curb grey traffic in the country. During the deployment of this system, FIA and PTA conducted a number of raids across the country on more than 30 illegal set-ups. Huge quantity of unregistered SIMs and illegal Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) gateways exchanges were seized during these raids.Unmonitored traffic has been a great security concern for all the stakeholders. The ICH revenues are expected to increase substantially which had seen a significant drop in the past few months due to the absence of this system. The incoming traffic has once again passed 600 million minutes mark in August 2013 with more than 20% increase from the July 2013 traffic.The PTCL, being the largest LDI, is expected to get benefits in terms of revenues from the ICH operations in the next few months. Now since the entire system is in place, it is expected that it will help the government to obtain $800 million from Etisalat as the payment was linked with effective curbs on grey traffic.