New Delhi, July 28: The government has said that the makers of BlackBerry - Research in Motion (RIM) - have to address its security concern by offering monitoring facility, else the popular smartphone company will have to shut its shop in India.
 The Ministry of Home Affairs has asked the Department of Telecommunication to tell the Canadian service provider in no uncertain terms that its email and other data services must comply with formats that can be monitored by security and intelligence agencies.
 The MHA made it clear that RIM has been addressing security concerns of several other countries, including the United States, where it operates and therefore, there is no justification to not comply the same in India.
 "If they don't follow our guidelines, we will have no option  but to ask them to stop their operations in India," an official said. The smartphone is used by nearly a million customers in India.
 Government also wants a blackberry server in India but the company  has been delaying the move. Once the server is in India, it will  be easy to track the messages.
 BlackBerry says the messages are encrypted. The smartphone's  server is based in Canada where the encryption level is very high  and extremely difficult to crack. And any message going through a  Canada server is encrypted and therefore cannot be accessed by intelligence  agencies in India.
 There are reports that China has got a similar server in the country.
 Senior officials of key security agencies in a recent meeting  argued that the continuation of BlackBerry services in the present  format presents a danger to the country. The meeting was attended  by representatives of the MHA, DoT, intelligence agencies and the  National Technical Research Organisation (NTRO).
 The latest development indicates that security agencies are  again finding it difficult to intercept or decipher messages sent  through these phones, which use codes with an encryption of 256 bits.
 This encryption code first scrambles the emails sent from a BlackBerry device and unscrambles it when the message reaches its target.

Lastupdate on : Wed, 28 Jul 2010 21:30:00 Makkah time
Lastupdate on : Wed, 28 Jul 2010 18:30:00 GMT
Lastupdate on : Thu, 29 Jul 2010 00:00:00 IST