A contact over at TIME let us know that there has been a bit of movement in the negotiations between RIM and the Indian government. We mentioned before that when pressed RIM offered to share “metadata” on communications to the Indian government but it looks like they were not happy with that proposal. According to TIME’s Sumon Chakrabarti:
A senior intelligence official tells TIME that the Indian government plans to give RIM 15 days from Thursday, Aug. 12, to ensure that its email and other data services comply by giving the government access to "formats that can be read by security and intelligence agencies." This is the second time that the Indian government has threatened to block the operations of BlackBerry. (New Delhi raised the possibility shortly after the murderous November 2008 siege of Mumbai.)
Another quote the received from Vikram Sood, former chief of India’s external intelligence agency, Research & Analysis Wing (R&AW), told TIME
Our concerns are genuine,…If a group of terrorists are communicating on a platform which the state has no way of accessing, then I have a problem. It’s as simple as that.
RIM is getting ultimatums left and right when it comes to decrypting traffic. The thing is that it seems like these governments have never heard of S/MIME, PGP, SSL, VPN, IPSEC, which ALSO encrypt traffic beyond any breakable means. Maybe they truly do need to be taught a lesson on how the internet works…
Img credit: nbnz99
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