Top BlackBerry officials to take part in discussion with govt

NEW DELHI: Canada-based Research In Motion, makers of BlackBerry phones, is rushing a team of experts to India to participate in the next round of discussion to resolve the issue of monitoring its messenger and enterprise mail services.

The team including a top official and technical experts from the Canada headquarters, will participate in the discussions with the security and technical experts of the government on the demand to access to Blackberry messenger and enterprise mail services.

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 urgency for the Canada-based smartphone maker came following the government's ultimatum that it would close down any service of the Blackberry which is not given access to the security agencies.

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.