Did cell phone companies help India spy on the United States?

Leaked documents acquired by a computer hacker collective appear to show that international cell phone manufacturers helped Indian intelligence agencies spy on the United States, in return for access to the Indian cellular phone market. The documents, which are written in English, were posted online on Saturday by a group of Indian hackers calling themselves Lords of Dharamraja. In a statement, the group said they obtained the documents by breaking into the computer servers of Indian Military Intelligence, after managing to acquire the source code of Symantec Corporation, makers of Norton antivirus software. According to the documents, the companies arm-twisted to assist Indian intelligence agencies to spy on the US included Apple, Nokia, and Research in Motion, the company that builds BlackBerry devices. The documents also appear to show that Indian intelligence agencies were particularly eager to spy on the United States-China Economic and Security Review Commission.



Established by the US Congress in 2000, the Commission is tasked with researching and reporting on the national security implications of bilateral trade between the US and China. Allegedly, the cellular telephone makers provided Indian intelligence agencies with backdoor access to personal phones used by Commission members. These back doors allegedly allowed the Indian Military Intelligence Directorate and India’s Central Bureau of Investigation to spy on Commission members beginning in April of 2011. Not everyone is convinced about the accuracy of the leaked documents, mainly for two reasons: namely because the existence of back doors in smartphone systems is often disputed; and also because nearly all of the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission’s annual reports are openly available online, which would seem to render spying against its members pointless. Moreover, the Indian Army, which oversees the operations of the Military Intelligence Directorate, has dismissed the documents as forgeries. Finally, Symantec says it is in the process of investigating the Lords of Dharamraja’s claims that they hacked into its antivirus program source code.