Blackberry to give govt data

By Pawan Bali

New Delhi, April 21: The BlackBerry, used by the high flyers won’t be banned in India. Canada based Research In Motion (RIM), which makes the BlackBerry, on Monday agreed to look into the security concerns raised by the Indian government, said sources.

"They have agreed to give access to the security agencies to the mails sent from the BlackBerry phones. One of the proposal given by the company is to set up their server in India," said sources. The RIM and telecom department will again meet on Tuesday to discuss how exactly the mails could be lawfully intercepted by the security agencies.

The issue came in the forefront when the government denied Tata Teleservices the permission to launch the BlackBerry services, as security agencies could not decrypt the mails sent through it.

The matter had reached such a point that there were speculations that the government could also ban the services in India. The emails sent through BlackBerry is encrypted at the 256-bit level.

RIM has its servers in Canada with the operators in India having mirror servers, but they do not any insight into the content of the traffic. While data between BlackBerry and other phones could be intercepted, communication between BlackBerry devices can’t be intercepted.