RIM Denies Giving Encryption Key to India

By Thea Neuman (Google)

While RIM’s competitors are at a comfortable position, RIM is pushing its luck in order to regain its lost position.

After U.S. media, more troubles have been created by the Indian media by saying that RIM gave an access of encryption keys of business email and message services to the Govt. of India.

Reports show that India has become one of the most sought after markets that possess tremendous growth opportunities for any company. Plus it’s one of the few countries where Blackberries are still extremely famous, so RIM wouldn’t want to spoil its terms with the national govt. Unfortunately coming to grip with the Indian government from past few years regarding granting access to its business emails and message services, this new sensational report has further worsened the situation for the Blackberry maker.

As far as the whole matter of handing over the encryption keys to Indian government is concerned, RIM stated that they themselves doesn’t have an access to the encryption keys since the possession lies with their business clients.

This news story that was published by leading English Newspaper of India, ‘The Economic Times’, stating that RIM has granted access to company’s business mails to the Indian government infuriated the BB maker.

RIM has made clear in a statement that it was never into unethical practices, and has been adhering to the laws framed by the Indian govt.

However RIM granted access to its popular messenger related services to Indian government in January last year, but it denied the possibility of security problems that might come up because of the access.

David Paterson (RIM’s chief officer of government relations) commented that he hopes that the Indian government would understand the significance of encryption as it builds a rock-solid foundation for fetching and sustaining global business in the country.

He assured that no changes have been made in India or any other place.

This is not the first time when RIM had a brush with the law. It had to face some troubles in Middle East as well. It blocked porn sites on its browsers after government of Indonesia interfered in this matter and forced RIM to do the needful.

For those business clients including companies and government agencies, who have agreed to sign up for the BB enterprise server- any data which is being sent from a BB device gets jumbled up at source and then again gets reconstructed after arriving to the receiving devices.

Earlier too, RIM explained that granting access to encrypted business emails lies in the hands of sponsor business enterprises and those firms which are technical specialists. This matter has been raised before, but this report of The Economic Times has given a new start to the controversy. While RIM says it does not possess the key, matters of security are extremely important to the national government.

Taking into consideration the fact that this whole matter regarding granting encryption keys does address the national security concerns of India, the government of India is certainly not going to cut RIM some slack.