After the on-going controversy over BlackBerry Services in India, Research In Motion (RIM) today submitted another proposal to the Indian Home Ministry on lawful interception of BlackBerry Enterprise and Messenger Services.
The Govt of India has given August 31st, 2010 deadline to RIM to come up with a solution to address India's security concerns.
Earlier on August 26, RIM said that BlackBerry Enterprise customers create their own key and RIM does not possess any master key to decode the data. The encrypted traffic is delivered through RIM’s servers, based mostly in Canada, though corporate clients can choose to host their servers elsewhere. RIM offered to provide information on a deferred basis and proposed to share IP addresses of enterprise servers, but that was not acceptable to the security agencies and Home Ministry. The security agencies said that they needed real time information, not the deferred one.
Union Minister of State for Communication and IT Mr. Sachin Pilot said "World-over services and email facilities are allowed to be intercepted by regulatory agencies in Government. We will not risk our national security, especially when answers to the problem have been found elsewhere in the world. When RIM has addressed these concerns in other parts of the world, I see no reason why the Indian government and security agencies should take any risk at all as far technology is concern.
Meanwhile, one of the leading GSM mobile service operator Vodafone Essar has inform their BlackBerry customers about the possibility of BlackBerry Enterprise and BlackBerry Messenger services being blocked from August 31.
The Department of Telecommunications (DoT) also instructed all telecom operators to ensure that a technical solution for monitoring BlackBerry services in Readable format is made available to the law enforcing agencies by August 31.
