BlackBerry makers to submit fresh proposal to govt soon

The smart-phone makers, which have a subscriber base of one million in India, have been conveyed in no uncertain terms for installation of its server with Indian Service Provider as security agencies have refused any deferred information.

"The Canada-based firm would give a fresh proposal in the second round of meeting scheduled Thursday," a government source said.

If the matter is not solved on Thursday, another round of meeting is likely to take place the next day, after which a final decision on the issue will be taken by the government, the source added.

Earlier, in a letter to Secretary, Department of Telecom, P J Thomas, Union Home Secretary G K Pillai had asked him to convey to the operators and RIM to come out with a technical solution to make available lawful interception of BES and BlackBerry Messenger Services BBM by the end of this month.

Toughening its stand, the government had recently conveyed to the cutting-edge communication device makers to install a server in India for tracking their messenger and enterprise mail service as the offer to provide data from their Canada-based server could be detrimental to New Delhi's national security.

The option RIM provided to the security agencies and the Home Ministry was that the authorities could hand over details of BlackBerry phones that needed to be monitored and the firm would decrypt the BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) and BlackBerry Enterprise mail Service (BES) of the smart phones in question, sources said.

RIM was ready to provide the information, initially manually and later through a non-human interface, using the "cloud computing environment" method under which a separate wall was created in the server and a code and pass-code handed over to the overall coordinator, in this case, India.

However, the proposal was rejected as security agencies said handing over telephone numbers for monitoring would expose the source to an outside company and this could be detrimental to the country's security.

Even the automated system of extracting information from a Canada-based server was not free of danger because the information could be hacked midway, they said.

RIM officials were told in no uncertain terms that they should deploy their interception server in India with the Indian Service Provider having a definitive tracking system.

The Home Ministry told the Telecom Ministry that if the security concerns were not addressed, the service should be stopped immediately.