After months of deadlock and a final warning by Indian government to give access to Blackberry users’ data, the company has finally given in to government demand.
The company has offered to share with security agencies its technical codes for corporate email services, open up access to all consumer emails within 15 days and also develop tools in 6 to 8 months to allow monitoring of chats– source
The Blackberry case probably had an impact from the recent Blackberry ban by UAE government, but the fact that all your email and chat is accessible to government may not go down very well with Blackberry users (which are mostly corporates).
The Canada-based company has also told the Government that it was willing to share data related to the IP address of the Blackberry Enterprise Server, Personal Identification Number (PIN) and the International Mobile Equipment Identity (IMEI) of any Blackberry device which the security agencies may want to track. From this information, security agencies can determine the location of the Blackberry server and then obtain decrypted message – source
Also, Indian government recently lifted the ban on purchasing Chinese equipments (by telecom companies), but the government has asked all telecom operators to get their networks certified for network forensics, network hardening, network penetration test and risk assessment by government-approved, internationally accredited network audit and certification agencies.
While one has to laud the government for taking such security measures, aren’t they playing with technology to an extent that it might hurt the perception of Indian market?
What’s your opinion?
