In a written correspondence to Kapil Sibal, Minister of Communications and IT, Robert E. Crow, vice president, (industry, government and university relations), Research In Motion (RIM) has said that RIM has delivered the technology required to monitor contents on its messenger service. Crow has also asked Sibal to issue a directive to operators to connect to this automated service.
RIM is installing and testing a new service, to be made available before January 31, 2011, which will automatically render lawfully intercepted BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) messages in a format readable by Indian agencies.
However, lawful access does not extend to the enterprise virtual private network (VPN) solution, provided through the BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES).
The company had said that there could be no change to the security architecture for BES in India or any other country as the decoding of BES emails by RIM is not technically possible given that neither RIM nor the wireless operators are ever in possession of the customers’ encryption keys.
Crow has also sought a meeting with Sibal to further discuss the issues relating to lawful interception and services being provided by BlackBerry.
