A top executive of BlackBerry-maker Research in Motion Ltd. has stated that Indian security agencies are making rather astonishing demands for increased powers to monitor email and other data traffic, raising serious privacy issues that threaten to harm the country’s reputation with foreign investors.
According to Robert Crow, Vice President of Industry and government relations for RIM, India’s Home Ministry, which oversees domestic security, wants the ability to intercept in real time communication on any Indian network—including BlackBerry’s highly secure corporate-email service—and get it in readable, plain-text format. Such a broad requirement raises the question of whether the government believes if any communications are legally off-limits, including email conversations of foreign ambassadors and financial records that get transmitted over secure telecommunications networks to Indian outsourcing companies.
Government officials in India have previously stated that they want to ensure that suspected terrorists and criminals can’t elude government surveillance by using newfangled communications technologies. Under current Indian law, the home secretary—the top bureaucrat in the Home Ministry—authorizes all telecom surveillance by central-government agencies for 60 days at a time.
For several months, RIM has faced demands from India to give security agencies a way to access encrypted messages on BlackBerry’s corporate-email service. BlackBerry has repeatedly said that its system is designed so that it doesn’t have the “keys” to unlock users’ messages—and it has refused to change its technology architecture in any one of the 175 countries where it offers service.
BlackBerry, which touts the highly secure nature of its email service as a key selling point globally, has faced intensifying demands from foreign governments for access to the service in recent months. The stakes in India are especially high, given that the country has more than 770 million wireless subscribers who are just beginning to shift from ordinary phones to smartphones such as BlackBerrys.