Government insists on solution to Enterprise Mail

The government on Monday said it will "insist" that Canadian-manufacturer of Blackberry provides solution to interception of Enterprise Mail, deadline for which ends on January 31.

Noting that a decision would be taken soon on whether to allow the BlackBerry Enterprise Mail or not, Home Minister P Chidambaram said he expected that Research-in-Motion (RIM), manufacturer of the smart phones, would be able to find some solution.

"I think a decision will be taken today by the Ministry of Home Affairs and the Telecom Ministry. I am not yet been briefed on the development in the last few days.

"As I said, like they have given us a solution to the Messenger service, we will insist that they give us the solution for the enterprise service too," Chidambaram told reporters after presenting monthly report of his ministry.

The BlackBerry had been given time till today to give a solution to the real time interception of its enterprise mail, but sources indicated that it could be extended by another fortnight or a month.

The comments from the minister came in the backdrop of BlackBerry makers saying that providing solution to access its enterprise mail service is "not possible" and asserting that the issue was not unique to them and has to be dealt at an industry level.

"There is no possibility of us providing any kind of a solution. There is no solution, there are no keys to be handed...It's not possible to do so because the keys of the service are in possession of the corporate enterprises," RIM Vice-President (Industry, Government and University Relations) Robert E Crow had said earlier.

Security agencies have been demanding access to all BlackBerry services as part of efforts to fight militancy and security threats over the Internet and through telephone communications.

RIM encrypts emails as they travel between a BlackBerry device and its BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES).

Earlier this month, RIM had said that it has delivered the technology to monitor contents on its messenger service (BBM) and had asked the government to issue a directive to the operators to connect to its new automated service.

This new service will automatically render lawfully intercepted BlackBerry Messenger messages in a format readable by Indian agencies.