The roughly 500 cybercafés in Mumbai, India, will soon have police-sanctioned keylogging software installed on their machines in the name of fighting terrorism. The software will track everything entered into web forms, chat rooms, e-mail, and more, and report it back to the government. Mumbai police say that cybercafé owners must agree to the installation of the software or else they will lose their licenses.

The president of India's Foundation for Information Security and Technology, Vijay Mukhi, told India-based newspaper MiD Day late last month that the decision was based on the fact that terrorists look to hide their Internet activities by using cybercafés instead of their home computers. "The police needs to install programs that will capture every key stroke at regular interval screen shots, which will be sent back to a server that will log all the data," he said. "The police can then keep track of all communication between terrorists no matter which part of the world they operate from. This is the only way to patrol the net and this is how the police informer is going to look in the e-age."

The police are in talks with M/s Micro Technologies to license its monitoring software, Cyber Access Remote Monitoring System (CARMS). CARMS will be able to provide monitoring of everything, from chats to file transfers and e-mails, even if they are encrypted. All cybercafés in Mumbai will need to work with the police to register the number of computers available, the types of computers, and the IP address of each machine. If they do not follow police orders, the owners of the cybercafés face stiff fines and "stringent action" under the Bombay Police Act.

Unsurprisingly, privacy advocates decry the move as Orwellian and unlikely to achieve the alleged goal (fighting terrorism), but Mukhi's response to the concern is very telling about the priorities of the Indian government. "The question we need to ask ourselves is whether a breach of privacy is more important or the security of the nation. I do not think the above question needs an answer," he said.

But some believe that the terrorism angle is just a thin veil over the government's efforts to get more information on the casual activities of its citizens. As Indian blogger Amit Varma pointed out, terrorists utilize many different communication methods—in many different locations—in order to carry out operations. Therefore, shouldn't the police also be monitoring telephones, cars, homes, and hotel rooms? Instead, he believes the police may simply resell the data it collects from the cybercafés or perhaps use it to make arrests for smaller crimes. For example, a Bangalore man was arrested earlier this month for uploading "blasphemous" material to social networking site Orkut. The police needed 10 months to gather enough information in this case to justify the arrest—with such stringent monitoring software installed in cybercafés, carrying out arrests for this type of crime would make the process much more streamlined.