India's Espionage Leaks

You may find this brief overview of Indian security's leaky past cases informative :

- "Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) hard drive theft. The hard drives were stolen from the offices of the Scientific Analyses Group (SAG) and the Institute for System Studies and Analyses (ISSA) inside the DRDO complex. The SAG is responsible for cryptography. In other words, all codes and cyphers to ensure communication security for the defence forces have an SAG stamp. The ISSA, on the other hand, analyses competing weapons systems for induction into the armed forces."

- "Rabinder Singh. It is said there was a question mark over his reliability since the early 1990s when he began an operation for the collection of intelligence about US government activities in South Asia through a sister of his, who was employed in a sensitive US agency with links to the CIA."

- "Rattan Sehgal. The IB's counter-intelligence division reportedly found that a woman CIA officer posted in the US embassy was in contact with government servants and others on a mobile telephone, allegedly registered in the name of their boss, the suspect IB officer."

- "KV Unnikrishnan. During those jaunts in Singapore, compromising photographs of the stewardess and her lover were taken. These photographs and other documents were recovered by mid ’86 and it was learnt that Unnikrishnan was working for the CIA."

- "Larkins Brothers. The Larkins’ interrogations led to the arrest of Singh and it was found that Jockey and Bud were CIA operatives."

- "Samba Spy Case. By 1974, he began working for its army's Field Intelligence Unit at Sialkot on a regular basis. In the June of 1975, Dass was arrested on suspicion of espionage but by then he had persuaded some of his colleagues (including a certain Aya Singh) to become accomplices."

Understanding the past means predicting or at least constructively speculating on the future. Insider leaks due to HUMINT recruitment activities may seem to have vanished given the increasing number of IT-dependent infrastructures and the insecurities their connectivity brings -- SIGINT taking over HUMINT espionage. While modern spy gadgets remain trendy, this very same connectivity has resulted in various hacktivism tensions in the past, namely the India vs Pakistan cyberwar, and, of course, MilW0rm's infamous speculation on breaching India's Bhabha Atomic Research Center through the use of U.S military servers as island-hopping points.

Office surveillance graph courtesy of BugSweeps.