India Gives RIM New Deadline to Open BlackBerry Communications

A ban lingers over the BlackBerry enterprise and messenger services in Indian, as the government has asked local telecom operators to work out a solution with RIM, that would give authorities unrestricted access to BlackBerry encrypted data, until the end of this month.

The Econimic Times of India reports that the ultimatum was the result of a closed-door meeting between Union Home Secretary G K Pillai and high-ranking intelligence officials, which touched on the issue of untappable telecommunications like those from BlackBerry devices.

According to the newspaper, the government's telecom department was told to "to

convey to service providers that two Blackberry services - Blackberry Enterprise Service and Blackberry Messenger Service - be made accessible to law enforcement agencies by August 31. If a technical solution is not provided by then, the government will review the position and take steps to block these two services from the network."

This seems like an impossible task for Research In Motion (RIM), the BlackBerry manufacturer, who's servers are only carriers for data already encrypted at device level.

The Canadian company stressed several times before that it doesn't have the cryptographic key required to decrypt communications between devices and BlackBerry Enterprise Servers (BESs) operated by private organizations.

Nevertheless, the Canadian company is trying to work out a solution that would address the Indian government's concerns about BlackBerry being used for terrorist activities due to the inability of national security agencies to tap into its communications.

According to StockMarketToday.in, following the new deadline announcement, a RIM delegation led by the company's Vice President Robert Crowe was sent to meet with Home Secretary G K Pillai.

After the discussions yesterday, Crowe said that he's confident the issue will be resolved, but that's not very reassuring for the country's one million BlackBerry subscribers, many of which are executives in multinational corporations.

RIM was previously willing to share data that would help Indian authorities identify devices and BlackBerry Enterprise Servers engaged in suspicious communications, so that they could subpoena the data.

However, this is a far stretch from what the government wants, because it implies tipping off the device owners that they are subject of an investigation and then there's also the problem of servers being hosted out of reach in another country.