BlackBerry gives in, agrees to lawful access of its services

Mangalore Today News

New Delhi, August 30: Canada based firm Research In Motion, the maker of BlackBerry smartphones, today agreed to give lawful access to its corporate e-mail and instant messaging services to Indian security agencies.

The smartphone maker has also decided to set up its servers in India to help the agencies to decode BlackBerry’s heavily encrypted traffic.

India, which struggles with a host of home-grown insurgencies and threats from terror groups based in neighbouring Pakistan, has been worried that BlackBerry phones could be used by militants.

The Home Ministry will now review issues related to Blackberry security within 60 days.

Earlier today, the Union Home secretary GK Pillai met key officials from the Intelligence Bureau and Dept of Telecom to take a decision on the BlackBerry issue. The government had imposed August 31 deadline for RIM, to give security agencies access to encrypted data.

India toughened its stance against BlackBerry earlier this month saying it would ban messages sent on smartphones unless the company came up with a way for security agencies to decode the heavily encrypted traffic by August 31.

Monday’s meeting follows weeks of talks between RIM and the government on ways monitoring could work without the firm abandoning its public commitment not to directly aid governments in decoding its messages.

The government has already told cellular operators to be prepared to shut off BlackBerry’s corporate messaging services. Non-corporate emails are less heavily encrypted and can already be accessed by Indian security agencies.

To head off a showdown, RIM offered last week to set up an "industry forum" to focus "on developing recommendations for policies and processes aimed at preventing the misuse of strong encryption technologies."

BlackBerry has about a million subscribers in India and the services are growing. Nine telecom operators including government owned BSNL and MTNL, Airtel, Vodafone, RCom and Tatas offer BlackBerry services.