RIM may allow India to snoop on some BlackBerry data
updated 02:50 pm EDT, Tue August 3, 2010
RIM may bend to India to keep business
RIM may have bent to India's demands to monitor BlackBerry phones, the country's Economic Times claimed Tuesday. Alleged leaked documents said RIM would open access to "technical codes" for the metadata of its corporate e-mail system and give access to regular individuals' e-mail within 15 days. In six to eight months, RIM would also have a way for India to monitor BlackBerry Messenger chats.
The newspaper asserts that RIM had proposed the ideas last week, at meetings on July 27 and 30. Its proposals are pitched as a compromise as they wouldn't give the messages themselves but would identify the specific phone and the server providing the message. India's Intelligence Bureau could then isolate the individual messages and try to decrypt them.
Officials from RIM didn't comment on the supposed leaks.
If accurate, the move would signal a sense of pressure at RIM to give in to government demands for the sake of market share. While it has insisted that it would respect privacy as well as local laws, allowing a BlackBerry ban would concede a potentially very large market. It faces similar threats from Saudi Arabia and the UAE but hasn't said whether or not it would bow to their requirements as well. The Persian Gulf area has often been a haven for BlackBerry use due to its importance for Middle Eastern business.
