Even as the Government is insisting access to all BlackBerry services, a technical committee has been set up to scan similar services provided by other players, including Apple, Samsung and Nokia. The committee will check if services provided by the various players are adhering to the security monitoring requirements.
“To address the issue in a comprehensive manner, a technical committee has been formed to look into the architecture of various similar services so that decision could be taken to address the issue of lawful interception of these services. The solution or action will depend on the nature, architecture of service and gravity of need felt by security agency,” said an internal Government note.
This comes after Research In Motion, the maker of BlackBerry devices appealed that they should not be singled out. The Canadian company RIM had said that smartphones from Apple, Motorola, Nokia, Samsung, HTC and Sony Ericsson use strong encryption in their products.
In the case of BlackBerry, the Government is still unhappy with the solutions offered by RIM to monitor BlackBerry Messenger. “RIM was asked to provide the architecture of the solution along with the communication path at a meeting held on December 2010. However, so far RIM has not provided this. In the absence of these details, it is difficult to ascertain the suitability of the solution and instruct the telecom carriers for connectivity and it is not known what instructions be given to them,” said a DoT source.
RIM had earlier said that it had offered a solution for snooping into BlackBerry Messenger and it was up to the DoT to issue instructions to the operators to connect to the platform.
On accessing the BlackBerry Enterprise Services, the Government is insisting that RIM set up a BlackBerry infrastructure in India. While the company has asked for a guarantee that their service will not be banned if they set up a local infrastructure, the Government has ruled out giving such a promise.
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