117 The home ministry is now setting up what could be called a 'Big Brother server'. This move, done in sync with new laws on active phone interception, greatly enhances the Government's powers to snoop on individuals. At the heart of this plan is a Centralised phone and data monitoring centre costing Rs 800 crore. The Centre will improve coordination among the seven agencies authorised to tap phones and also with the states. "It will help centralise data collation and give the Central agencies actionable intelligence in more or less real time,'' says a home ministry official. It will also generate data about the number of phones being tapped countrywide. The monitoring system will connect the small towns and cities of a state to its capital, and all the state capitals will be linked to a centralised monitoring centre in Delhi via fibre optic cables. If the IB wants to monitor a phone at Gonda in Uttar Pradesh, they can do so sitting in Delhi after sending necessary authorisations to the service provider. It will even make the process of tapping much smoother for the states since the capital city will be connected to the local switchboards. "It also increases the responsibility of the service provider since he is bound to deliver the traffic wherever asked,'' the official added. It will, for the first time, allow the Government to seamlessly monitor a suspect's cellphone across several networks and across the country. An intelligence official calls this the "nuclear weapon" of phone tapping software. "Implemented in its full form, it will give us the precise location of any individual within a cellphone network," he says. This is why the Government plans to maintain the mandatory audit trail file, which will have electronic footprints of the number tapped-the agency given access for how long and if the conversation was recorded and if any copies were made. This protocol is followed worldwide and the audit file is crucial in the courts of countries where phone taps are