A top-secret blueprint to monitor the online activities of Bangladeshi entities and individuals, especially in relation to the January 2024 general elections, was prepared three years ago, during a December 2021 meeting attended by senior officials of the country’s intelligence agencies, the Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission (BTRC) and the National Telecommunication Monitoring Centre (NTMC), documents accessed by the Northeast News reveal.
According to the minutes of the (December 28, 2021) meeting, which was held at the BTRC’s Dhaka headquarters and under the chairmanship of Bangladesh telecommunication, information technology and posts minister Mustafa Jabbar, the officials, including representatives of the Directorate General of Forces Intelligence (DGFI), were informed that “since the 2018 elections and now, all organisations involved in national security have been facing new and different kinds of challenges in the world of cyber security”.
Chillingly, in his opening words, the then BTRC chairman Shyam Sunder Sikder, said that “in view of the forthcoming (2024) elections to the 12th Jatiya Sangshad, the law enforcement and intelligence agencies and organisations involved in cyber security must work intensively, strengthen inter-agency coordination and deepen and widen all necessary capabilities”.
The document containing the minutes of the meeting was signed by Jabbar on January 12, 2022. Copies of the minutes were shared with a host of secretaries to the Bangladesh government and other top officials of several sensitive organisations, including the Rapid Action Battalion, NTMC, army headquarters, Air Intelligence Department, National Security Intelligence (NSI), DGFI, Criminal Investigation Department (CID), Police Bureau of Investigation (PBI), Special Branch and several senior police officers among others.
On his part, the director-general of Bangladesh’s Special Security Force (SSF) made a detailed PowerPoint presentation on the functions of “BTRC’s ‘Digital Security Cell’, content reporting system and content block/operations methods, IP TV and the draft policies on online news portals besides OTT and social media”.
Shedding light on the functions of BTRC’s Digital Security Cell, the organisation’s chairman discussed the “monitoring of social media platforms”, their “use by different extremist/terrorist and anti-national organisations” and how these were brought under the purview of the BTRC and the NTMC following a meeting of a National Committee on May 1, 2021.
In this context, the BTRC chairman said that the BTRC and the NTRC, along with the intelligence agencies, had been empowered to act against the “activities” of such terrorist/extremist and anti-national organisations.
The document reveals Jabbar’s position on how the BTRC could adopt such functions in accordance with the “directions from the Prime Minister’s Office on surveillance of social media platforms by the intelligence and security agencies”. Jabbar, the document says, said that the “BTRC’s surveillance would be supplemented by the intelligence and security agencies”.
Sikder, the document, says expressed satisfaction over the “efforts” of the BTRC and other organisations concerned to “force” social media platforms such as Facebook, Google, Amazon, Netflix to pay “NBR (National Board of Revenue) VAT charges”. The matter related to forcing Tik Tok to pay up NBR-imposed VAT charges was also under consideration in 2021.
The document reveals that pressure applied by the BTRC on Google, especially in relation to the “confiscation of some of its illegal cash servers” by the commission’s “engineering and operations division” had forced the world’s largest search engine company to hold meetings with the organisation.
During the December 28, 2021, meeting, the DGFI representative (a wing commander) suggested that the existing “reporting system” for Facebook and YouTube, if “applied to other social media platforms, including Instagram and Twitter, would make it “convenient and easy to work”. The DGFI officer also suggested taking steps to “stop” the “anti-national live streaming” of videos on Facebook.
