You are probably aware that the Indian government has been gunning at Research in Motion – the manufacturer of the popular Blackberry series of handsets, due to concerns over the misuse of Blackberry’s encrypted messaging system by terrorists. Towards the end of August, RIM finally appeared to have succeeded in placating the government’s concerns by agreeing to set up a server in India. However, according to The Economic Times, RIM’s woes are far from being over.
The department of telecommunications (DoT) has rejected the solution proposed by Research in Motion on the grounds that it doesn’t allow security agencies to obtain email and chat communications in plain text (unencrypted/decrypted) form.
RIM has been under fire from several nations including Indonesia, Saudi Arabia and the UAE. Even the United Nation’s telecommunications agency urged it to share data with law enforcement agencies. RIM has been insisting that it doesn’t have a magical key to decrypt the data which is protected using end to end encryption. It will be interesting to see how RIM responds to this new development. If it doesn’t manage to come up with a satisfactory solution by the end of this month, then the one million BlackBerry subscribers in India might have to do without BlackBerry services like e-mail and chat.
