Canadian Blackberry smartphone developer RIM (Research in Motion) is in news due to serious security concern by various countries. One of the main reasons to worry is the messages and data is being routed through RIM’s servers based in Canada. Countries like India and United Arab Emirates (UAE) have already shown their concerns about the security issues these governments have with RIM’s Blackberry services.
Why they are worried?
- RIM’s servers are hosted from home country Canada thus legally out of reach.
- Blackberry uses triple data encryption standard (DES) and advanced encryption standard (AES) to encrypt the data. Since, their server is located in Canada data and messages cannot be intercepted by Indian intelligence agencies.
What they want?
- Indian Government wants RIM to host its Blackberry server in India so that from security point of view data interception and tracking will be easy. However, RIM has been opposing the same.
- Indian Ministry of Home Affairs want Blackberry email and data services must abide by the formats which can be monitored by country’s intelligence and security agencies.
Presently, leading Indian service providers including government owned PSUs are offering their telecom and data services on Blackberry smartphones. Vodafone, Bharti Airtel, Reliance Communications, Tata Teleservices, BSNL and MTNL offer BlackBerry services. So now 4 lakhs Indian Blackberry users will have wait and watch how RIM will address these security issues.
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There were earlier talks of doing the same with VOIP calls also. This would mean that not only blackberry and other smart phone devices would become useless but also so many other companies like skype that rely on VOIP for call orignation and termination.
Yes, the government wants to spy on us. That’s not really new is it?
Whether we use Blackberry, TrulyMail, or PGP to encrypt our email it is our right to do so. We must keep these tools so that we can communicate freely without government interference.
Great timing on behalf of the Indian and UAE governments to announce their dictatorship stipulations ahead of the Torch unveiling.
The stock was poised for a nice pop, now many are in the red.
Chalk it up to global trade and the pitfalls when doing business with countries who are unmistakably still in the dark ages.