RIM in Talks with Indian Authorities to Avoid Blackberry Services Ban

Recently, several countries of the Middle East region banned some of the cellular services provided by smartphone manufacturer Research In Motion (RIM) due to privacy issues. This included the Saudi Arabian government barring RIM to enable their messaging system in Saudi Arabia on their BlackBerry smartphone devices. Now news has surfaced that RIM is working with concerned authorities in India to avoid a similar fiasco like it face in Saudi Arabia so that none of its services may be barred.

Blackberry Bold 9700 White RIM in Talks with Indian Authorities to Avoid Blackberry Services Ban

In order to set course alright for things, RIM has issued a new customer updates which tells its fair operating policy within ‘legal circles’. The statement reads:

In response to the statement published today by the Government of India, and further to RIM’s Customer Update dated August 2, RIM wishes to provide this additional information to its customers. Although RIM cannot disclose confidential regulatory discussions that take place with any government, RIM assures its customers that it genuinely tries to be as cooperative as possible with governments in the spirit of supporting legal and national security requirements, while also preserving the lawful needs of citizens and corporations. RIM has drawn a firm line by insisting that any capabilities it provides to carriers for “lawful” access purposes be limited by four main principles:

1. The carriers’ capabilities be limited to the strict context of lawful access and national security requirements as governed by the country’s judicial oversight and rules of law.
2. The carriers’ capabilities must be technology and vendor neutral, allowing no greater access to BlackBerry consumer services than the carriers and regulators already impose on RIM’s competitors and other similar communications technology companies.
3. No changes to the security architecture for BlackBerry Enterprise Server customers since, contrary to any rumors, the security architecture is the same around the world and RIM truly has no ability to provide its customers’ encryption keys. Also driving RIM’s position is the fact that strong encryption is a fundamental commercial requirement for any country to attract and maintain international business anyway and similarly strong encryption is currently used pervasively in traditional VPNs on both wired and wireless networks in order to protect corporate and government communications.
4. RIM maintains a consistent global standard for lawful access requirements that does not include special deals for specific countries.

The Indian government hasn’t finalized any decision as yet about limiting BlackBerry services or not, but new things might unfold in the near future.

Source