Indian Government to Ban certain BlackBerry Services
Posted on April 18th, 2008 | Filed under: BlackBerry
There is a constant question raised with the BlackBerry services being launched in India. Now the Home ministry has requested telecom operators to not offer “certain” BlackBerry services until a proper monitoring system is put in place, said Minister of State for Home Affairs Sriprakash Jaiswal.
The ban on the BlackBerry services is mainly due to security reasons as conversations like calls, emails and SMS between one BlackBerry device to another BlackBerry device cannot be intercepted as the servers are based in Canada.
“The government has issued instructions to all mobile service providers, inter alia asking them not to connect or provide/run certain BlackBerry services unless the required monitoring systems are in place,” said Jaiswal, as he highlighted that the ministry has not imposed restrictions on the use of BlackBerry.
By “certain” services the government hints that the four service providers currently offering BlackBerry services in India are Airtel, Vodafone, BPL and Reliance Communications and they should temporarily stop the services between one BlackBerry to another BlackBerry user.
As a fix to the problem, the government has requested Research in Motion (RIM), the licensor of BlackBerry, which has over 12 million users globally, to route all its calls and e-mails through servers based in India to allow security agencies to go through them so as to avoid fears of its usage by terrorist outfits. RIM has asked for some time to respond to the request raised by the Indian Government. India has also warned of “strict action” if RIM fails to respond with a viable solution to this issue, telecom ministry sources said.
