LONDON: Spooked by threats of wire-tapping and snooping, Indian diplomatic staff have dusted out their typewriters and have been ordered to hammer out sensitive documents on paper and not on computers, high commissioner Jamini Bhagwati said on Thursday. He said staff had been told to be careful about discussing classified information inside the embassy premises for fear of bugs planted by international security agencies.

Recent revelations made by whistle blower Edward Snowden showed that the US National Security Agency (NSA) planted bugs at the Permanent Mission of India at the United Nations and the embassy in Washington. The NSA supposedly used four different kinds of devices to spy on the Indian diplomats and military officials.

Replying to a TOI query, Bhagwati said, "No highly-classified information is discussed inside the embassy building. And it’s very tedious to step out into the garden every time something sensitive has to be discussed."

Calling it a blunt force security system, Bhagwati added, "Top secret cables are never conveyed through the internet or machines with cable connections. External hard drives with tremendous amount of data storage capacity are easy to access. Therefore, top secret cables are written on the typewriter which can’t be tracked."

Bhagwati said he wasn’t aware whether Britain’s spy agency GCHQ had bugged the high commission in London. In a lighter vein, he said, "The British might have got bored with what they hear us talking inside the embassy. They must be saying ‘this is what the Indians talk’."

GCHQ has been a partner of America’s NSA in the global snooping operation. Snowden has revealed that a top secret American internet snooping programme had 700 servers installed at 150 locations across the world to track internet traffic, including one in India.

Snowden revealed a top secret XKeyscore programme run by NSA that allowed analysts to search with no prior authorization through vast databases containing emails, online chats and the browsing histories of millions of individuals.

A map of locations of the surveillance servers has shown that a server was installed near Delhi to snoop into Indian internet users.

Snowden has also revealed that the US government paid at least £100m to the UK spy agency GCHQ over the last three years to secure access to intelligence gathering programmes. And that GCHQ had tapped into 200 fibre optic cables, which gives it access to huge amounts of information every day – equivalent to sending the contents of all the books in the British Library 192 times.

The documents reveal that by last year GCHQ was handling 600 million "telephone events" each day, had tapped more than 200 fibre-optic cables and was able to process data from at least 46 of them at a time. GCHQ has for years been collecting vast streams of sensitive personal information and then sharing it with the NSA, Snowden said.