RIM Faces BlackBerry Ban in Turkey

Research In Motion (RIM) faces a ban of BlackBerry data services in Turkey if it doesn't comply with new legislation, requiring all manufacturers to hand over communication encryption keys to authorities.

Under the newly passed law, the country's Information and Communication Technologies Authority (BTK), will collect the encryption algorithms and encryption keys from every hardware provider wanting to provide encrypted telecommunications capabilities for its devices.

The new regulations aim at combating terrorism and try to make it possible for the country's national security agency to tap into any suspect communications if the situation requires it.

According to Turkish Press, BlackBerry is the only smartphone with encryption enabled by default on the local market and RIM is expected to provide BTK with the necessary codes as soon as possible.

Moreover, Tayfun Acarer, chief of the communication authority, pointed out that BTK will not grant RIM any deadline.

"We will not give a certain period of time to RIM, because the law is already in effect," he told the Milliyet daily newspaper, adding that if the Canadian company fails to do so, BTK will not hesitate to enforce the legislation.

Fears over the possibility of a BlackBerry ban have been expressed before, when the new regulation was still being worked on.

At that time, the country's Minister of Transport and Communications Binali Yildirim said that RIM's problem will be overcome when the law is published.

A ban will prove problematic for the 400,000 BlackBerry users in Turkey, which include top company executives and some of the country's most influential businessmen.

On the other hand RIM maintains that it cannot comply with such requests, at least as far as the corporate email is concerned, because it doesn't have the keys.

For this service, encryption is achieved between smartphones and BlackBerry Enterprise Servers (BES) operated by companies, in which case RIM serves only as carrier of the encrypted data.