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Blackberry Gives India Access To Servers

Posted by timothy on from the good-thing-we-can-trust-governments dept.

Meshach writes "As happened earlier in Saudi Arabia Blackberry has reached a deal that allows Indian authorities access to the transmissions of hand held devices. Much of the fear comes from worries about terrorists: Pakistani-based militants used mobile and satellite phones in the 2008 attacks that killed 166 people in Mumbai."

9 of 182 comments (clear)

  1. Lesser evil? by cestmoa · · Score: 2, Informative

    I somewhat can understand the concern of law enforcement that a secure mail environement makes their job more difficult. On the other hand, giving access to the RIM infrastructure implies that you are no longer innocent until proven otherwise, but you are now suspect until your innocence is proven. BAD

    While Internet Service and PIN2PIN messages seem to be encrypted with the same key for everybody, RIM always claimed that enterprise mail is encrypted with a unique key end to end from the enterprise server to the device and that nobody else has this key, specially not RIM. Enterprise mail solution is crypted with AES 256bit, so if this is true, your corporate mail should still be safe. And if you don't trust this, use S/MIME or PGP or don't use mobile corporate mail at all.

    Anyway, this step does not increase the customer trust in the RIM solution, I really hope for a clear statement from RIM on this purpose.

  2. The United States by KingSkippus · · Score: 4, Informative

    Can you believe the unmitigated nerve of those crappy little backwards countries and their oppressive Big Brother-ish monitoring of their citizens!!? Thank god nothing like this could ever happen in the United States, where we actually give a rat's ass about protecting our privacy from the government!

    Oh, wait... Well, shit.

  3. Re:Oh, I get it ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    ... India is also 60% Muslim ...

    15%

  4. No, obviously you don't get it. by sdnick · · Score: 4, Informative

    India actually did get hit recently by Muslim terrorists who received intelligence, coordination and orders from neighboring Pakistan over mobile phones for several days as they moved through Mumbai targeting non-Muslims and racking up a body count of 166.

    Saudi Arabia and the UAE didn't suffer any recent attacks coordinated and made possible by mobile phone technology, and both have historically been far more willing to curtail free speech than India (which isn't anywhere near US standards for free speech itself).

    RIM should have hung tough and refused India's request, but at least India had a legitimate reason to ask. "All about spin" - yeah, darn that annoying reality and how it gets in the way of the narrative you prefer.

    1. Re:No, obviously you don't get it. by Mashiki · · Score: 1, Informative

      Nor would I. But India's parliament doesn't exactly work the same way as others do, and many of them are behind the times on their core understanding of technology. Even more-so then in other countries, where government lags on average of 10yrs behind both what the public is saying/thinking, and what they should actually be doing.

      --
      Om, nomnomnom...
    2. Re:No, obviously you don't get it. by BangaIorean · · Score: 1, Informative

      Cowardly Anonymous one: This case was sadly, the result of a horrendous miscommunication between the police and the cellphone service provider (Airtel). If you have googled carefully enough, you'd have seen that he was found innocent and let off in 50 days. His case got unprecedented media coverage, and this man has sued both, the police and Airtel. So your attempt to project India as a police state in the league of Saudi Arabia falls flat - try again or troll harder.

  5. Re:Phfft. by OrangeCatholic · · Score: 2, Informative

    Box cutters and WATER. Oh god I hope I never get a job handing out bottles of water in earthquake ravaged haiti, HOW will I get the water there and how will I open the packaging!?!?!

    Or can you put water in a cargo plane? But wouldn't all that water just blow up even more??

  6. Re:RIM had a very different tune Thursday by troll8901 · · Score: 2, Informative

    I think there's a difference in the encryption levels for emails (BlackBerry Enterprise Server) vs instant messaging (BlackBerry Messenger).

    At least, according to the video link provided by AC, way below: http://www.ndtv.com/news/videos/video_player.php?id=157644

    So what happens is, RIM provides the decryption codes for instant messaging. The emails, however, cannot be decrypted, since RIM does not have the codes - they're stored locally on BlackBerry Enterprise Servers, which are set up locally within company premises.

    Or so the story goes.

  7. Re:Oh, I get it ... by BangaIorean · · Score: 2, Informative

    Dude - you have access to Google, Wikipedia, and the whole uncensored internet. it isn't too tough to do some basic research on such well known statistics. The percentage of Muslims in India FYI is 13.6%.