Blackout that BlackBerry faces

Owing to all that confusions taking place around the most used business phone in the world—the Blackberry and the adamant stand of Research In Motion (RIM) on how their policies will work in India, we need to go back in time, as this issue was first thrown into the limelight during November 2008, in the Mumbai carnage, and since then there has been a crest and trough going on, until now…

The supposed reason that can be behind this is that RIM had allowed Chinese government some ‘partial access’ to their encrypted data, which was again called as a speculation by RIM themselves. However, home is constantly in talks with RIM to allow access to their data, to which RIM is not replying
positively, as stated by the ministry.

In the last few days, due to such uprising, the home ministry has threatened to ban Blackberry enterprise services and mail services, asking them to provide intelligence agencies the access to monitor their data transfer over PIN to PIN messenger service & enterprise mail service.

On the other hand, the home ministry had called a meeting of all the mobile services operators, asking them to help the department of telecom in deciphering and monitoring the enterprise services data of RIM.

Apparently, RIM has come out with a tentative solution on providing access to the Metadata of Blackberry services, which will be monitored by Indian security agencies. Department of telecom remained unsatisfied with the deal as Metadata was the only showing the length of the text, and when it was written and its author, which is of no use, even if the author turns out to be a terrorist. In reply to the DoT, the RIM said that they have been keeping their policies same for all countries.

The services that will be affected due to this turndown are perhaps only the PIN to PIN messenger and other enterprise services. As far as mail services are concerned, those services are being monitored by the security agencies and won’t be expected to shut down. Like the ones which send mails from blackberry to other accounts like yahoo and gmail. But the new spot put up on rediff is still again spoofing some of those worried professionals and accountants.

The query put up is one of the best, ‘The mail doesn’t stay encrypted all the way. When it gets delivered to an external e-mail system such as gmail or corporate mail. The exception is when you’re not using a gmail or a company mail ID, but are sending pure BlackBerry mail. That’s not merely one sent between two RIM devices, but where both From and To are BlackBerry IDs. That’s rare…’ so this obviously puts in jeopardy, that will home ministry be able to put a ban on these, or will it not?

The most recent of all news shows that, DoT has supplied a detailed report to the home ministry that they can monitor the private data that is used by the enterprise services. DoT explained in that report that, by tracking and accessing the email to which the enterprise sends it data, and then monitoring that email. But, the question still remains that whether that and emails intercepted are in readable format or do they still need to be deciphered further?

To achieve this, it has been speculated that home ministry may hire young professionals, and cyber security companies to do them this favour.

Blackberry has proposed to provide ‘partial access’ by September 1 and ‘full access’ by starting of December. While the home ministry is adamant to close and shut down the entire blackberry services by August 31, this end of month is surely going to be one hell of a blockbuster as 675 million Blackberry users await their fate.

But our main concern remains. If Blackberry does allow access to the Indian security agencies, what guarantee can these companies provide about the privacy of the user? Moreover, shutting down these applications won’t be the perfect and precise solution, because a majority of these apps can be easily picked up from the net. This, in turn, also means that government should ban other such applications like GoogleTalk and Skype.

I condemn the behaviour of DoT. Banning this service is not the solution to this problem as many other third-party software providers can also provide chatting & messaging facility on cross platform. The government should implement centralised logging system on priority basis.