Bangladesh Telecommu-nication Regulatory Commission (BTRC) asked the mobile phone operators to record all conversations as well as to archive all text and multimedia messages and to make them available to the government whenever it wants.

Muhammad Omar Farooq, BTRC's chairman, sent a confidential letter to the operators on Thursday ordering them to install "lawful interception" system without outlining the details. He also asked the operators to "maintain call related information and have provision for maintaining call content, so that on the request of the requiring bodies, this can be made available to them forthwith."

Sources said BTRC had a series of meetings with the operators on the eavesdropping issue and the operators always agreed to link their respective networks with the government's recording facilities. In those meetings the regulator said the government will record the calls and messages but now it is asking the operators to do that job.

"How can we install 'lawful interception' system when it is unlawful at the first place?" commented a mobile operator's high official requesting anonymity. He dubbed the directive as "grossly inconsistent" because recording the conversation of any customer or preserving clients' messages is totally illegal for any operator and the telecoms law as well as the license strictly mandates them to maintain customers' privacy.

Sources said the government has realized its incapability to maintain and process a mammoth database of fast growing tens of millions of mobile users. It has allegedly prompted Omar Farooq, who was the home secretary right before joining BTRC, to devise the idea of asking the mobile operators to do the intelligence agencies' job instead.

"We will step into a legal minefield soon after recording our customers' calls and we simply can't do that," another mobile operator's high official commented to The Daily Star, requesting anonymity. Sources said all operators have forwarded BTRC's letter to their legal departments and all the CEOs are likely to meet soon to strategize a unified legal warfare against the telecoms regulator.