new delhi indian intelligence agencies could be trying to acquire sweeping interception capabilities including on phones abroad according to the latest batch of emails made available by wikileaks the whistleblower website has revealed thousands of emails from the communications of hacking team a controversial italian company that provides surveillance technologies to many autocratic regimes and other countries including india the most startling fact that emerges from these mails is that the indian intelligence agencies could be looking to acquire knowhow not just targetspecific but the ability to throw a sweeping net of surveillance over a large number mobile phonesread also govt mulls new snooping policy to balance security and privacycentre client of shady italian snoop firm wikileaks while capabilities to target specific phones already exist with the agencies the kind of capability that they seem to be now looking for is almost in line with the privacy breach that edward snowden leaks exposed of the us intelligence setup this also means the agencies could be looking to sidestep the need to get written permission of the union home secretary before carrying out any interception every single case of telephone interception can be done only with the written permission of the home secretary at the centre or his counterpart in a state in the past both ntro national technical research organization and army intelligence kicked up huge controversies over their use of offtheair interceptors without legal sanction an email sent in april 2013 by a senior official of hacking team to their business partner nice of israel reveals the sweeping capabilities that indian intelligence agencies planned to acquire massimiliano luppi of ht after talking to his singapore team on a presentation to an indian agency says that the gap between their capabilities and indian demands is the difference between clients understanding of our solution and the reality of what our solution can do he says the client possibly raw research and analysis wing brought a nonsmart phone at the demo and was surprised that we are not able to support nonsmart phones but it is nothing that cannot be easily overcome during the follow up the italian official says from operational aspect they indian agency expected the installation of our agent just by knowing the phone number in this scenario the chances of success are just a few and the risk of jeopardizing the whole investigation is high luppi points out it is the same analogy as creating an agent using the word exploit send the same email to 100 people without any knowledge of their target and hope that one of them will open the email and get infected technically possible operationally at high risk of being spotted or having the suspect very suspicious that something strange is going on he points out the ht team specializes in creating interception capabilities that are powerful and can seriously compromise privacy of individuals in an email sent to maharashtra police one of its senior officials claims that their solution rcs remote control