Google says sharing Gmail encryption keys not possible

A couple of months back, the Indian government asked Research In motion (RIM), the Canadian manufacturer of smart phone Blackberry, to give Indian intelligence agencies access to encryption keys of its messaging service.

RIM has till 31January 2011 to comply with the government's demand to share its encryption keys that protect the content (like email or chat) of millions of its Indian users in the country.

The government's security drive seems to be expanding to include other forms of electronic communication that cannot pass through their systems. Google's popular email service Gmail is said to be one of these. But, according to a report in The Economic Times newspaper, Google has already said it will not share the encryption keys of its email service with the Indian security agencies for reasons of privacy of millions of Gmail users worldwide.

According to Google India chief Vinay Goel, it would be impossible to offer real-time access since Gmail service is governed by US laws. He added that user privacy was very important to Google because users expect their communication to be protected by the company.

However, Google said it would cooperate with the government in case there was a large-scale risk to human life and property. But analysts wonder how practical could this arrangement be since a situation of the kind would not be known in advance for the government to be monitoring it all the time.

Analysts wonder why electronic security is proving to be such a big issue to the government. The government, the report pointed out, does not have the technical resources to intercept communication on the internet that is protected by high levels of encryption.

Meanwhile, they say it is strange that the government had actually asked Indian ISPs to scale down their encryption levels for them to monitor systems in the country.

They say there seems to be a complex issue involving privacy of users which companies are obliged to protect vis-à-vis security concerns that warrant monitoring of all possible forms of communication that may be used to harm national interests.

Meanwhile, the million dollar unanswered question is whether Google would be banned it refused access to its encryption keys for Gmail.