Cops asked to penetrate suspect social media groups

New Delhi: The Central government has asked the law enforcement agencies to penetrate suspect social media groups which may indulge in subversive or any other anti-national activities, to access information about them.
The personnel of police and other law enforcement agencies have been asked to breach the closely-guarded WhatsApp groups, Facebook pages, telegram, signal and other encrypted chatting applications to keep an eye on the suspected trouble makers to pre-empt any terror activities or crime, Home Ministry sources said.
Such a suggestion was given as it was found that security establishments were, many a time, caught napping when anti-India activities were carried out under their nose and later, the police chiefs would shift the blame to Intelligence Bureau citing complete “intelligence failure”.
The direction issued by the Central government is a part of the instructions to the police chiefs to use technology for intelligence gathering.
“Use of technology in intelligence generation and detection as well as post-event analysis needs to be extended to pre-empt crime with effective use of data mining and analytics,” the directive states.
“It further states that innovative ideas are required to generate real-time information,” said a source in Ministry of Home Affairs.