Higher ranking police officials would go through criminal records to identify those who were to be surveilled by the constabulary, to this end history sheets or "bad character rolls" were maintained on such individuals.
[4] The section 5 of the Indian Telegraph Act allowed the Governor General or a Local Government to temporarily seize any licensed telegraph, and also gave them the ability block, intercept, detain, or even disclose the contents of any message transmitted during a "public emergency" or in "interest of public safety", the Secretary to the Government had a final say on whether something met those two criteria.
Over time Aadhaar has become increasingly mandatory to access basic state services, a necessary document for KYC verification to obtain a mobile SIM card, create a bank account, access loans, school and college admissions and scholarships, and has even been linked with other identification documents like the PAN card and Voter ID.
Privacy advocates have pointed out that this level of Aadhaar integration allows the state to track all aspects of daily life of an individual as there is no legal restriction on the amount of information the government can access from this database, creating the necessary infrastructure for mass surveillance.
The system could detect selective words like “bomb”, “blast”, “attack” or “kill” within seconds from emails, instant messages, status updates and tweets.
To enhance the capacity of the DRDO NETRA Project Black Knight was initiated in late 2013 to monitor social media trends and identify source of various viral messages that posed a risk to tranquility of the global community.
Not much detail is available about the project, but it is rumored that the group of engineers later founded a private organization and now conducts social media analysis on Indian and foreign subjects by tapping fiber optic cables in India and overseas, including cybertapping infrastructure on the main internet communication cable in Mongolia which links rest of the world to China.
[24] LIM systems are used by the Indian Government to intercept records of voice, SMSs, GPRS data, details of a subscriber's application and recharge history and call detail record (CDR) [25] and monitor Internet traffic, emails, web-browsing, Skype and any other Internet activity of Indian users.
[30] An analysis by lawyers Vrinda Bhandari, Abhinav Sekhri, Natasha Maheshwari and Madhav Aggarwal of orders passed by Delhi Police under Section 144 found that the law is being used to create a parallel surveillance network.