New Delhi, Aug. 3: If you are a BlackBerry user, you can rest easy. The Indian government isn’t going to follow the examples of the UAE and Saudi Arabia and ban the service altogether. However, the government would be able to snoop in on your emails, conversations and chats, if you are not a corporate customer.
On Tuesday, Canada-based Research in Motion (RIM), the developer of BlackBerry, reportedly agreed to open up some of the services provided to individual customers to the government spooks in the next 10 days. It is trying to find solutions to provide access to other services, said government sources.
“BlackBerry has agreed to provide regular access to intelligence agencies to some of their service like messaging, voice data and MMS. For rest of their services they have told the ministry of home affairs they are trying to find technical solutions,” said a source in the home ministry. Government sources said that intelligence agencies are interested only in accessing the services of individual customers and not the classified information of the corporate clients of the BlackBerry, which has been popular with corp-orates because of its secure encryption technology.
Meanwhile, BlackBerry tried to assure its corporate clients that their information is secure. “The BlackBerry security architecture for enterprise customers is purposefully designed to exclude the capability for RIM or any third party to read encrypted information under any circumstances.
RIM would simply be unable to accommodate any request for a copy of a customer’s encryption key since at no time does RIM, or any wireless network operator, ever possess a copy of the key,” said the company in a statement.
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QWhat’s the dispute about BlackBerry services?
The government wanted BlackBerry maker RIM to allow security agencies to monitor conversations, emails and messages to track terror suspects and set up its server in India.
Currently, BlackBerry’s server is based in Canada where the encryption level is very high and difficult to crack. However, RIM has resisted the demands as its subscribers choose BlackBerry because of the security it provides.
Q Does any other government has had similar concerns?
The UAE had banned BlackBerry services after it refused to give access its messages. Saudi Arabia has asked it to cut off messenger. Bahrain wanted it stop using messenger to distribute news. But RIM supposedly allows US and UK security agencies access to its services.