India Re-affirms its Demands for Access to Corporate Email

I am not sure how RIM is going to wiggle out of this one. According to the Hindu Business Line the Indian government reaffirmed its demands that telecom operators terminate any services that cannot be monitored to their satisfaction. Union Home Secretary Mr G K Pillai is taking a new approach just demanding it from the licensed Telecom operators and having them deal with RIM. The thing is there is nothing RIM can do…

My favorite part is that these Indian officials continue to be totally oblivious to how the internet works. Any smartphone that is capable of a VPN connection (including the iPhone, Android, Symbian, etc) is practically impossible for them to monitor. RIM’s corporate email is simply an always on VPN connection. Unless Indian officials are so clueless that they want to ban practically every laptop or smartphone they seem to be holding RIM to a different standard. Better yet if you have an SSH client on a laptop or even a smartphone you are once again capable of traffic that these rocket scientists in the Indian government want to monitor but are totally incapable of doing so.

All in all this could be a huge blow to RIM if they don’t find a way to smooth it over. On the other hand it seems like they are stuck between a rock and a hard place…

Thanks Tashanna for the tip!