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India gets serious on smartphone monitoring
Submitted by Jaideep Kumar on 2010, August 21 - 12:35

RIM BlackberryIndian Government has toughened its stance and has given an ultimatum to Research In Motion Ltd, the makers of Blackberry device to provide a way to access and monitor data sent from its devices or face a ban.

RIM wants to ensure confidentiality and secrecy for its customers with the high level of encryption applied while the authorities want to be able to monitor the data for potential security threats.

The mechanism scrambles the emails when sent and then unscrambles them when it reaches its destinations. The security agencies were concerned over the BlackBerry’s Enterprise and Messenger services which can be used by potentials threats to the country.

The home ministry was concerned about monitoring data services on these handsets and had raised the issue with the company. The ministry has asked the telecom authorities to give RIM a period of 15 days to align its email and other data services with the Formats that can be read by the security and intelligence agencies.

Security officials have said that continuation of BlackBerry services in the present format is dangerous for the security of the country. They indicated that the security personnel are unable to or find it very difficult to intercept or decipher messages that rely on codes with high encryption and are sent from these phones.

Meanwhile, RIM provided has given security agencies an existing tool that’s allows them to monitor text on encrypted BlackBerry messenger and the company is developing a tool to give to security agencies around the world. Security officials are now able to monitor Blackberry Internet, voice calls and short messaging.

The government appears to have cleared other services such as the BlackBerry messenger, voice calls and short-messaging services of the company after it addressed security concerns raised by security officials in the country. The government has not cleared the corporate email service on Black Berry devices. Similar security concerns have also being raised in other countries including Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.