The home ministry has summoned Canadian firm Research In Motion (RIM) — makers of the BlackBerry device — along with service providers on April 9 to resolve the issue of monitoring text communication exchanged from the phone.
Though the government has made it clear that there are no plans to ban BlackBerry services, the move is aimed to address the concerns of security agencies by asking RIM to move some of its servers to India, sources in the home ministry said.
The meeting on April 9 will also be attended by officials of the department of telecommunication (DoT), which has already contacted RIM over the issue. The Canadian firm is expected to submit its reply during the meeting.
Meanwhile, service providers Airtel, Vodafone and Reliance have supported DoT's demand that RIM should set up servers in India for monitoring purposes.
The issue arose after Tata Teleservices was denied permission by the home ministry to launch BlackBerry services due to security concerns. The ministry has sought access to all text communications made through BlackBerry devices at any given time, which is currently not done as the data is transferred in encrypted format.
As BlackBerry does not allow any interception, the Centre sees this as a security threat, particularly in the current scenario where terrorist organisations are using the Internet to communicate.
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