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RIM agrees to cloud-based monitoring of messenger services
By siliconindia
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Tuesday, 21 December 2010, 19:55 IST
New Delhi: BlackBerry maker Research In Motion (RIM) appears to have reached on a consensus with the Indian security agencies. The Canadian company has agreed to have its messenger services monitored through the cloud, in lieu of setting up a local server. The Home Affairs Ministry has responded in affirmative to this offer.
Robert Crow, Vice President (Government Relations), RIM wrote a letter to the Ministry of Home Affairs saying, "As per the compliance schedule agreed to by both Research In Motion and the Ministry of Home Affairs, RIM infrastructure is ready to receive and process via the cloud computing-based system lawfully intercepted BlackBerry Messenger data from Indian service providers."
RIM had earlier let the security agencies track its voice calls, SMS, chat conversation on a real-time basis. However, the bone of contention was the interception of BlackBerry Messenger and BlackBerry corporate e-mails.
The issue with the mail and Messenger services is that due to their high encryption format the security agencies are unable to intercept them, as they don't have the required technology to do so. Although the cloud based monitoring will allow agencies to track the Messenger service, the email service will still be out of access.
At the moment it is not known what solution RIM plans to come up with for interception of its email services. RIM was served a deadline till January 31 to provide a final solution for intercepting its services.
The Ministry has also directed the DoT to monitor the enterprise communication services by other providers like Nokia or Cisco. It should be noted here that Nokia has already set up a server in India.
