RIM Facility Helps India Monitor Messages, Email
RIM Facility Helps India Monitor Messages, Email | News & Opinion | PCMag.com
Research in Motion has set up a small facility in India to help the government lawfully monitor some of the encrypted data that travels over its servers.
Citing people familiar with the matter, a Wall Street Journal report said the facility has satisfied an ongoing disagreement between RIM and the Indian government for the time being, but officials still want more access to BlackBerry email and instant messages.
Last year, the government threatened to shut down RIMs services completely in the country if RIM did not offer a solution to let it intercept messages on BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) and BlackBerry Internet Service email. The government gave RIM several deadlines to come up with a solution or have its services cut off. While RIM repeatedly passed those dates without solving the issue, it seems a temporary agreement has been set.
The new facility in Mumbai lawfully intercepts BBM messages and some consumer email. If India has a concern about an individual, it can submit the name of the suspect to RIM, which will tap into the persons cellular data and pass the information to officials.
But this has only slightly appeased the government, which would like to be able to decrypt these messages itself without having to disclose names to RIM, the Journal said.
However, this wiretap arrangement doesnt apply to the BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES), which provides service for business customers and operates at a higher level of encryption. In fact, RIM maintains that it doesnt even have the keys to encrypted emails on the BES, which is part of the reason this service is popular among corporate users.
The Journal said Indian officials arent as worried about corporate email, considering most of RIMs growth is happening among consumers rather than business-end users.
RIM said in a statement that it continues to work very well with the Indian government. We are not operating under any deadlines and we believe the government of India is now applying its security policy in a consistent manner to all handset makers and service providers in India, which means that RIM should not be singled out any more than any other provider.
Its not just RIM that the Indian government would like to monitor. According to a report by an Indian government expert committee obtained by the Journal, officials would like to monitor services like Skype, Facebook, and Twitter as well.
Despite the governments demands, it seems RIM has quelled its concerns for the time being and the company isnt in immediate danger of getting booted from India. Milind Deora, Indias minister of state for telecommunications, told the Journal that the government is continually working with RIM to avoid extreme options of shutting down BlackBerry service.
We are trying to find some middle ground, she said.
its crminal u know, let the show continue for some time my dear 
