Governments around the world are learning that the way to get concessions out of RIM is to threaten to ban their services. Now that RIM avoided a ban in the UAE we still have India left threatening RIM.
RIM and India originally had a October 31st deadline for a ban that came down to the wire. RIM oddly cooperated and avoided that deadline. The issue is that Indian officials were asking for access to everything including BES emails which RIM has vehemently denied having the ability to provide. RIM has already provided the Indian government with “manual” access to BlackBerry Messenger with promises to add “automatic” access.
According to Electronista RIM is now on another deadline with 90 days to provide India’s security forces with access to its BES data. Supposedly RIM has made assurances to Indian officials that unmonitored BlackBerry BES data could not be used by terrorists in real time to communicate. I am not sure how they could possibly make such assurances but who knows… Maybe RIM is already monitoring our BES emails through a backdoor? I doubt it but surely time will tell.
