NEW
DELHI: A day after the home ministry suggested that BlackBerry smartphone
services could be stopped if manufacturer Research In Motion (RIM) did not
comply with the security guidelines that require it to make data transfers
decipherable to intelligence agencies, the government appeared to have reached a
truce with the Canadian firm, with the ministry saying RIM had given an
assurance that its security concerns would be addressed.

“BlackBerry has assured the ministry of home affairs that the
issue of monitoring of the BlackBerry will be sorted out soon… I am sure we
will soon be on the same page and our concerns will be addressed ,”
special secretary (internal security) in the ministry of home affairs (MHA), UK
Bansal, said on Thursday.

Unhappy over RIM’s reluctance to
give the security agencies access to the encryption key for BlackBerry messaging
or to set up servers in India, the home ministry had on Wednesday asked DoT to
indicate to RIM that its BlackBerry messaging services could be shut down if the
e-mails and SMS did not comply with formats that can be monitored by the
security agencies.

Mr Bansal said the DoT was the nodal authority
which makes the policy and it was working to address the BlackBerry issue raised
by the MHA.

Though the security concerns over Black-Berry messaging
services have been raised since 2008, RIM has been non-committal on either
locating servers outside Canada or on reducing the level of encryption.

RIM had been telling DoT that BlackBerry was created to ensure
secrecy in corporate deals and communication, and that this secrecy would be
compromised were it to part with the encryption key. The firm has also offered
to meet the intelligence agencies’ request for decoding the data transfers
on a case-by-case basis.

Only earlier this week, UAE government had
mirrored India’s security concerns when it said the smartphone services of
BlackBerry posed a security threat. “Certain BlackBerry applications allow
people to misuse the service, causing serious social, judicial and national
security repercussions,” a government statement said.

The UAE
authorities said their concerns rested with how data on the network is managed
and stored, and specifically, that it was kept outside of the Emirates.
BlackBerry maker RIM uses a high level of encryption on data transfers, which
for some users is a key selling point, but is seen by various Middle Eastern and
Asian governments as a problem and a method to circumvent security forces.

NEW
DELHI: The Indian government and BlackBerry maker RIM will soon find a way to
make security checks possible on its high-end handsets, a home ministry official
said on Thursday, downplaying fears of a ban on its email and internet services
that are hugely popular in corporate circles.

The country’s
internal security chief Utthan Kumar Bansal told reporters that the home
ministry had raised national security concerns with RIM over monitoring data
services on these handsets and added that a solution may be found soon.

“BlackBerry has assured home ministry that the issue of
monitoring will be sorted out soon. I am sure we will soon be on the same page
and our concerns will be addressed,” Mr Bansal said.

ET first
reported on July 1 that security concerns associated with the services of
BlackBerry, the smartphone used by nearly a million customers in India, have
come to the fore again. This raised the possibility of a fresh stand-off between
the Canadian service provider and the government.

The home ministry
had asked the telecom department to give RIM a 15 day deadline, ending this
month to ensure that its email and other data services comply with
‘formats that can be read by security and intelligence agencies’
after its spooks raised a red flag against the handset maker.

Today,
the country’s biggest telecom service providers such as Bharti Airtel,
Vodafone Essar, Reliance Communications, Tata Teleservices, BSNL and MTNL offer
BlackBerry services.

Earlier this week, the Intelligence Bureau has
asked the telecom department to stop Nokia’s popular messaging services in
India until they can be monitored. The security agency had written to the
department of telecom that it is against the continuation of the Finnish
company’s push email service for corporates and consumers that allows the
easy management of multiple accounts.

A Nokia India spokesperson had
told ET that its messaging email service is still in the beta format here, and
that “the requisite infrastructure required by security agencies is being
put in place”.

BlackBerry and Nokia collectively account for nearly
all the corporate email consumers on mobile phones in the country.