NEW DELHI — an Executive of BlackBerry-maker Research in Motion Ltd. said that Indian security agencies are doing "pretty amazing" requests for more powers to monitor email and other data traffic, raise serious privacy issues that threaten to damage the reputation of the country with foreign investors.
Robert Crow, vice President, relations between industry and Government to the brink, said India's Home Ministry, which oversees internal security, wants the ability to intercept any communication in real time on any Indian network — including BlackBerry highly secure corporate e-mail service — and get into readable, plain text format.
This large raises the question whether the Government considers that any communication is legally off-limits, said, including foreign ambassadors conversations e-mail and financial records that get transmitted over secure telecommunications networks for Indian outsourcing company.
"Connect the dots and you're saying, ' Holy smokes, '" Mr. Crow said during an interview ".This statement is made in an environment where we don't really read the privacy statements or other content or data — and where we have a rather poor record keeping administrative things, such as wiretaps secret. "
Showroom of Bloomberg News to BlackBerry in New Delhi. India wants more surveillance of e-mail.
A spokesman for India's Home Ministry refused to comment. Government officials in India have said they want to ensure suspected terrorists and criminals cannot evade government surveillance using newfangled communication technologies. Under the current Indian Act, the Home Secretary — the top bureaucrat in the Ministry Home — authorizes all telecom surveillance from Central Government agencies for 60 days at a time.
For several months, RIM has addressed requests from India to give agencies a way to access the encrypted messages to the service of corporate e-mail BlackBerry. BlackBerry has repeatedly said the system is designed in such a way that does not have the "keys" to unlock messages users — and refused to change its architecture technology in any of the 175 countries where it offers the service.
Mr. Crow said he is heartened by India, at least, that no longer seems to be RIM's discovery. India has made, he said, that other advanced services — such as virtual private networks, or VPNS, and messaging services, peer-to-peer are outside of its surveillance.
It is not clear if the Indian Government has set no deadline for when it should access the BlackBerry Enterprise-e-mail and other services and if it would take the drastic measure to stop the services that are not compatible with. Indian media reports have said that the Government has said the Indian telecommunications operators to submit plans by March 31, showing how they would accommodate the needs of security agencies. But the Government has not made any announcement.
Mr. Crow said that telecom Ministry is optimistic that India, which is beginning to assert more authority in this area, will have a better understanding of the technological constraints and RIM faces a solution to the problem that does not require the BlackBerry to compromise user privacy. A spokesman for the Ministry-telecom refused to comment.
But Mr. Crow said he expects talks with India to drag on, given the inherent delays in democracy in the country and the lack of clearly defined regulations on data protection and privacy.
"I think this can go on and on in India, and frankly it will be one of those things that people talk to the Indian business environment — one that won't be seen in favor of India in international comparison," said Mr. Crow.
BlackBerry, which touts the nature of its highly secure email service as an essential point of sale worldwide, has faced growing demands from foreign Governments for access to the service, in recent months. At stake is particularly high in India since the country has more than 770 million wireless subscribers who have just started to move from ordinary phones to smartphones like the BlackBerry.
Mr. Crow said that he has proposed ways to the intelligence and security agencies in India to advance investigations without accessing the actual content of messages encrypted e-mail BlackBerry. Telecom operators can derive the so-called meta-data about messages, like messages were sent, and the corporate mail server went through, he said.
"If that model of communication were known to the authorities, for legitimate reasons," said Mr. Crow, "then the authorities would be able to go to the correct business entity that owns the server" and pursue their investigation of a suspect.
In January, RIM fixed the security issues of India with the BlackBerry Messenger chat service, which uses a lower level of corporate e-mail encryption. The company has given Indian Telecom operators, a system that allows them to key in the phone number of a suspect and gets unscrambled versions of Messenger chat, when he was provided a legal system, said Mr. Crow.
Mr. Crow says on potential plans to expand in India, where it already has a data center and where software developers are making around 11,000 programs to run on BlackBerry RIM is "kick the tires". A chance down the line is for India to manufacture some of the thousand different parts that go into a BlackBerry.
"There is a heck of a lot of demand [BlackBerry] within three or four hours flying time of most production sites in India including India itself," he said.
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