Govt assures Canada on BlackBerry

"We are fully aware of the sensitivity and confidentiality of our conversation with RIM and would like to assure them that we respect their commercial interest and would do nothing to jeopardise the same," Telecom Secretary Siddhartha Behura said in a letter to Foreign Secretary Shiv Shankar Menon for communication to Canada.

He said the government hoped that it would be able to resolve the issue satisfactorily and speedily. "The signs are encouraging."

The Canadian High Commissioner David M Malone had written to Communications and IT Minister A Raja on April 17 on the issue of lawful interception of information as related to Canadian company Research In Motion (RIM). He had said the issue to be understood was who in the Government of India was empowered to resolve this issue.

Malone had written: "This is also necessary in order to ensure that right representative from RIM are at the table. The discussions managed by the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) to date have inspired little confidence that those involved on the Indian side are actually empowered to settle the matter as Indian government's demand of RIM keep expanding while media leaks proliferate, some of them very damaging from a security perspective and sourced by the journalist involved directly to the DoT.

"Potential terrorists are now aware, because of these leaks, of technical issues unknown to most of us previously."