The Government has set a fresh deadline of March 31 for telecom operators to provide interception facility to all Blackberry services.

Even though research In Motion, the maker of BlackBerry devices, has offered a solution that will enable security agencies to intercept most of BlackBerry services, the Government is unhappy with it.

“RIM was asked to provide the architecture of the solution along with the communication path at a meeting held in 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 an internal Government note.

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.

Enterprise services

On the issue of 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.

RIM and the Government have been discussing this issue for over three years with deadlines being shifted repeatedly. DoT officials indicated that though the Government does not want to ban the service, security agencies want strict compliance of the licence norms. Since RIM does not come under any telecom licensing laws, the onus for compliance is on the operators.

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