Blackberry maker Research in Motion (RIM) may not have to cough up an elaborate caching and monitoring system for its enterprise customers as feared.
Replying to a question in the Rajya Sabha, deputy communications minister Sachin Pilot said the government is free to check out the mails at the premise of RIM’s corporate customers, rather than within RIM’s network.
“Research in Motion (RIM), the providers of Blackberry services, have not yet given the solution for interception of their Blackberry Enterprise Service (BES). According to RIM they do not possess any key for this service because communication offered through this service is dynamically encrypted. However, message in clear text can be obtained from the Enterprise Email Server, where it is in readable format,” he said.
The statement seemed to indicate an acceptance of the position taken by RIM that it cannot build enormous facilities to store and monitor all its clients’ communication as they are encrypted by their clients and not by itself.
Due to this, it had pointed out, even RIM had no way to figure out what was in the communications.
The Home Ministry had been insisting on “full access” to RIM’s network, including its corporate messaging system while the Department of Telecom had been won over by RIM’s technical arguments.