The Department of Telecom (DoT) has asked telecom operators Idea Cellular and Vodafone to provide Intelligence Bureau (IB) identification of subscribers using Internet on their mobile phones.

DoT officials said instructions have been issued to Idea and Vodafone to provide the requisite information to IB at the earliest.

The security agency had sought details of some mobile numbers by providing the corresponding IP addresses to Vodafone but the telecom operator failed to respond.

The DoT has also instructed other operators to put in place a suitable mechanism that would allow the security agencies to uniquely identify the individual user based on the information provided by them.

The security agencies have long been asking the operators to set up a system which allows identification of individual user based on the information of IP address, date and time. IB had earlier also raised objections regarding the practice of mobile operators using network address translation (NAT) device wherein a single IP address is used for many connections, they said.

IB had said that in the absence of user-identifying logging mechanism at the NAT, despite IP address, date and time stamps, service providers are unable to pinpoint the exact target of a particular communication over the Internet.