Comply with security rules or shut shop, govt tells BlackBerry

The government has said that the makers of BlackBerry—Research in Motion (RIM) — have to address its security concerns by offering the monitoring facility. “If they don’t follow our guidelines, we will have no option but to ask them to stop their operations in India,” a senior official said.

The smartphone is used by over a million customers in India. The Ministry of Home Affairs has asked the Department of Telecommunication to tell the popular smartphone company in no uncertain terms that its emails and other data services must comply with formats that can be monitored by security and intelligence agencies.

The MHA made it clear that RIM has been addressing security concerns of several other countries, including the United States, where it operates and, therefore, there is no justification to not comply the same in India.

The government also wants a blackberry server in India but the company has been resisting the move. Once the server is in India, it will be easy to track the messages.

BlackBerry says the messages are encrypted. The smartphone’s server is based in Canada where the encryption level is very high and extremely difficult to crack. And any message going through a Canada server is encrypted and therefore cannot be accessed by intelligence agencies in India.