Report Claims RIM Willing to Share Enterprise Email Data in India

Local media in India reports that Research In Motion (RIM) is close to reaching a deal with the authorities that would give them access to unencrypted BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES) data.

Mint, an Indian business newspaper published in collaboration with The Wall Street Journal, quotes an unnamed home ministry representative as the source for the information.

"They have in principle agreed to provide us recorded data from their servers," revealed the senior official who is familiar with government meetings on the subject.

"Now they have assured us that they will discuss the issue first among themselves and find a way to meet our demands. Later, they would be providing live access to BES," he added.

This is a very interesting statement, since according to RIM, the current BES security architecture makes it impossible for the company to provide access to unencrypted data.

Unlike with BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) conversations, the keys used to encrypt corporate emails are stored on BES servers operated by private organizations.

This means that RIM's network serves only as carrier for the already encrypted data and that the company never handles it in a readable form.

According to Reuters Canada, RIM called the Mint report "inaccurate and misleading" and said that talks about data sharing in India are advancing according to several core principles.

These require for data sharing to be legal, for BlackBerry to not be singled out, for its enterprise security architecture to remain unchanged and for any deal reached to not be specific to India.

RIM recently signed agreements with the governments of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, which previously threatened to ban BlackBerry data services. However, the company kept quiet about the details of those deals.

This led to researchers launching a project to map the company's network in order to determine if local servers have been installed in those countries.