Fall in line by Aug 31: Govt to RIM

The Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) has given an ultimatum to Research In Motion (RIM), which offers BlackBerry services, to come with a solution for interception of data in two key services or face a ban.

The two services include its popular BlackBerry Messenger Service and its BlackBerry Enterprise services.

In a letter to the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) Secretary P J Thomas, Union Home Secretary G K Pillai requested him to tell the operators and RIM to make a technical solution available on lawful interception of its services by August 31 or face a ban.

Pillai also had a meeting with representatives of security agencies, DoT as well as officials of state-owned BSNL and MTNL on the contentious issue of finding a solution to the BlackBerry logjam.

According to PTI, a Union home ministry spokesman said, "In the meeting today, DoT was asked to convey to service providers and RIM that the BES and messenger services be made accessible to Legal Enforcement Agencies (LEA) and to find a technical solution by August 31.”

"If a technical solution is not found by August 31, the government will review the position and take steps to block these two services. As of now, voicemail, SMS and Blackberry Internet Services (BIS) have been made available for interception," the spokesman said.

Some of the telecom operators confirmed they have already been sounded out informally on the issue by senior DoT officials.

A RIM spokesperson in India, when contacted, declined to comment on the issue.

Meanwhile, a top official of RIM made a courtesy call on Home Minister P Chidambaram.

Last week, BlackBerry had made a fresh attempt to break the impasse by offering the "metadata" to security agencies but that was not enough for the security agencies.

RIM had earlier said it was impossible for it or any other third party to read encrypted data sent via its enterprise offering and the company cannot accommodate any request for a copy of a customer's encryption key.

The company had earlier agreed to the IP address of the enterprise server, located in the customer’s premise, as well as the PIN and the IMEI number of each Blackberry mobile phone used by a subscriber, to enable security agencies access the data in a readable format.

In a meeting with DoT, the company executives said the only way for security agencies to obtain the decrypted data is at the email server, which is located in the customer’s premises.

Bharti Airtel, Vodafone Essar, Reliance Communications and state-run telecom PSUs Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd and Mahanagar Telephone Nigam Ltd are among the operators which offer Blackberry services to their mobile subscribers. It is estimated there are 1.8 million BlackBerry users across the country. Two years ago, similar concerns were raised against BlackBerry services but then DoT had said all the issues have been resolved.

RIM has been facing security concerns in many countries across the world which include Saudi Arabia. The Saudi government has, however, come to a settlement with the company.