UPDATED 14:16 EDT / JANUARY 13 2011

RIM Partially Bows to India’s Demands, Provides Gov’t Access to Consumer Messaging

Research in Motion (RIM) has partly raised the white flag and succumbed to one of the Indian Government’s eloquent requests over its BlackBerry Messenger Services: to access consumer messaging. Now, the government can freely intercept and monitor messages being sent over via BlackBerry Messenger or BBM to many and BlackBerry Internet Service or BIS.

RIM released an official statement to update users and customers:

“The lawful access capability now available to RIM’s carrier partners meets the standard required by the government of India for all consumer messaging services offered in the Indian marketplace.” The Canadian-based company further elaborated, “No changes can be made 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.”

This dispute has placed RIM and its BlackBerry in critical condition and possible ban as reported in an article in SiliconAngle.  The same report noted that India was demanding to be given the authority to monitor the message exchanges via text, phone calls, videos and other multimedia channel to calculate security risks—a clear deviation from RIM global standards. This and many other communication issues related to government intrusion has questioned India’s capability to sustain mobile business whose key priority and ideals revolve around information security.

However, India’s demands were not absolutely fulfilled. The government is still anxious in getting access to RIM’s communications sent over corporate service—something that the company firmly denies the authority. This call by India is something that might compromise the entire label and its universal enterprise paradigm.

This is actually just one of the many dilemmas that RIM is embattling within the international scene. As they expanded their arm worldwide mentioned by Isha Suri of SiliconAngle, the company also met far-fetched challenges as RIM makes significant concessions to international governments. RIM went as far as Indonesia to work on blocking pornographic sites. A similar report says that members of the Middle Eastern region are also not giving RIM easy ways.


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