An Ordinance That Got the Trade-off Right
Give the interim government credit for the instinct. On December 24, 2025, Bangladesh's Council of Advisers approved a draft Telecommunication (Amendment) Ordinance built explicitly to rein in the surveillance architecture assembled over the previous sixteen years. It abolished the National Telecommunications Monitoring Centre (NTMC) — the body at the center of years of complaints about warrantless wiretapping — and replaced it with a narrower Centre for Information Support (CIS) under the Home Ministry, restricted to technical assistance rather than surveillance itself. Lawful interception was limited to defined grounds — national security, law and order, life-threatening emergencies, judicial investigations. A new quasi-judicial council would hear complaints about unlawful interception, and the Parliamentary Standing Committee would publish an annual public report on interception activity, budgets, and institutional capacity (BSS, Dec. 24, 2025; UNB).
The steelman for even having a broad interception power at all is real: Bangladesh faces genuine cross-border security threats, and no telecom regulator anywhere operates with zero lawful-intercept capability. The ordinance's answer — keep the power, wrap it in a judicial-style check and a standing parliamentary report — was a defensible attempt to reconcile that need with the abuses that had made "NTMC" a byword for unaccountable surveillance among Bangladeshi journalists and opposition figures.
What Survived the Rewrite
That ordinance was provisional. Once Tarique Rahman's Bangladesh Nationalist Party won February 2026's election and formed a government, parliament had to convert interim-era ordinances into permanent law. What emerged — the Telecommunication Regulation (Amendment) Act, 2026 — kept the interception power under Section 97A. It dropped most of what constrained it.
On July 28, 2026, eight organizations — Access Now, Amnesty International, ARTICLE 19, CIVICUS, Fortify Rights, Human Rights Watch, the Robert & Ethel Kennedy Human Rights Center, and Tech Global Institute — wrote directly to Prime Minister Rahman. Their joint statement says the final Act "removed many of those structures and safeguards, and expanded the discretion available to authorities exercising these highly intrusive powers," stripping out "rights-oriented language, accountability and oversight architecture, procedural specificity, and transparency provisions" that had been in the draft. Section 97A itself, they write, "retained surveillance and interception powers" while leaving agencies free to issue binding directives to service providers with only "limited opportunities to challenge the legality, necessity, proportionality, or scope" (Tech Global Institute / joint statement).
That is a specific, checkable claim: a council, an annual public report, and defined interception grounds existed in the draft law and do not survive, by the signatories' account, in the enacted one. The statement's list of demands is correspondingly concrete — an independent legislative commission to review the Act, judicial pre-authorization for interception, a functioning parliamentary oversight committee, and narrower data-privacy exemptions for state agencies.
A Government With Standing to Know Better
What makes this notable rather than routine is who is being asked. The joint statement pointedly notes that "members of your own party, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, were among those subjected to" the surveillance apparatus built under the previous administration. Sheikh Hasina's government ran a Digital Security Act, in force from October 2018, that let police seize equipment and compel data from service providers without a warrant; Human Rights Watch and other monitors documented thousands of cases brought under it, many tied to nothing more than a critical social media post. The 2023 Cyber Security Act that nominally replaced it kept much of that architecture intact. A BNP government has fewer excuses than most to reproduce the pattern.
Yet the telecom-surveillance rollback isn't an isolated data point. Human Rights Watch reported on July 19, 2026 that this same government has moved to bar the Human Rights Commission from investigating alleged rights violations by security forces — days after a habeas corpus filing over Miraj Sheikh, a fisherman the Coast Guard detained near the Sundarbans on April 10, 2026 and then denied ever holding, before a High Court order forced an inquiry (HRW, July 19, 2026). Read together, these aren't unrelated stories: they're a government letting interim-era accountability ordinances lapse across more than one domain at once.
The Case for Finishing What the Ordinance Started
None of this argues for stripping Bangladesh's security services of interception capability outright — that isn't what the rights groups are asking for, and it wouldn't be realistic policy for a country with active cross-border security concerns. The argument is narrower and harder to dismiss: Bangladesh's own interim government already drafted a workable model — defined grounds, an independent complaints body, mandatory public reporting — and the elected government that inherited it chose to keep the power while cutting the parts that made it accountable.
That choice also carries an economic cost the government's own investment ambitions argue against. BTRC's parallel reforms this cycle — restoring the regulator's independence from the ministry, banning blanket internet shutdowns, lowering penalty structures — are explicitly pitched at attracting telecom and digital investment. Warrantless interception with no independent check cuts against that pitch: foreign operators and platforms weighing Bangladesh exposure now have to price in a legal environment where user data can be compelled with no judicial gatekeeper and no published record of how often it happens. Judicial pre-authorization isn't a novel or radical ask — it's the baseline in most jurisdictions Bangladesh competes with for digital investment. Restoring it would cost the government little and would answer the rights groups' complaint directly, rather than leaving Section 97A as the version of this law that stuck.