BlackBerry in another face-off with India

BlackBerry services in India have once again come under a shadow with the country's home minister charging the Canadian company, Research in Motion (RIM), with failing to provide government access to customers' corporate e-mails. RIM has always claimed that technically it was not possible to provide such access.

''We will insist they give us a solution for [the] enterprise service,'' P Chidambaram, India's home minister, said Monday. In an earlier arrangement RIM has provided Indian authorities' access to BlackBerry's basic messenger service – that too after much hedging.

Along with a number of other countries, the Indian government too has repeatedly asked RIM for access to all BlackBerry services as part of a drive by the country's intelligence services to monitor security related issues via mobile phones and the internet.

India has reasons to be concerned as terrorists made free use of internet and other services to stage strikes such as the attack in Mumbai in 2008, which killed 166 people. Encrypted messages, such as BlackBerry's corporate e-mail, are ideal tools for misuse by such forces.

RIM, however, has always claimed that BlackBerry did not have keys to break the codes of the encrypted messages in their clients' corporate e-mails. Just last week Robert Crow, vice-president of government relations at RIM, said there was''…no possibility of us providing any kind of a solution [related to our enterprise services].''

He said, ''There is no solution, there are no keys to be handed [over to the authorities].''