Forty-five years after the legislature first introduced a controversial amendment, Section 5(2), to the erstwhile Indian Telegraph Act, 1885, giving central and state governments the power to intercept communication, the contentious issue has once again come to the fore. The Maharashtra government’s decision to turn down a proposal by the Anti Corruption Bureau (ACB) demanding the power to tap phones in the wake of a spike in graft cases has, once again, raised some pertinent questions.

Law enforcement officials and civil rights activists on both sides of the divide continue to argue the pros and cons of giving the state the powers to infringe upon an individual’s right to life and liberty, and right to free speech enshrined in Article 21 and 19 (1) (a) of the Constitution. The counter argument to the state’s intrusions into an individual’s private life is that of state and national security, especially in a country like India where terrorism has, time and again, reared its ugly head, resulting in laws like POTA that curtail civil liberty and provide justification for outright phone tapping as a “necessary evil” in such an environment.