It is foolish to think that phone taps serve no purpose. Sunil Jain (“PR’s day off”, May 3) assumes this to be the case. All over the world, governments tap phone calls for all manner of reasons and then follow this up with other investigations. The famous Hansie Cronje match-fixing case was cracked through phone taps. The taps are just one source of information.
Even terrorists can get caught in this manner. They need to have elaborate financing and it is difficult to know what tap will lead to what information. Phone taps may lead to information of how the money is being laundered and brought into the country — once again, this is then followed up with detailed investigation. In the Mumbai terror attack, routine monitoring ensured our intelligence agencies knew the attack was coordinated out of Pakistan — that we didn’t act upon the information is a failure of our intelligence network, but the taps were very effective.
Shailendra Jha, New Delhi
