After agreeing in a compromise so as to continue marketing their Blackberry devices in India ; RIM has done an about turn in their agreement to provide the Indian government with abilities to intercept and spy upon text messages sent using Blackberry devices. Since Blackberry uses a different technology as compared to traditional cell phones,

one which is more secure ; the Indian government has threatened to stop allowing sales of such devices since intelligence agencies were worried about mis-use by terrorist cells.

Last month RIM had agreed to provide access to the Indian government to their servers but they have now declined that this could not be possible given that the encryption codes are only on the devices themselves. RIM claims that their system has no backdoors which would allow them to spy upon the consumers communications. For enterprise customers, the security architecture is based on a symmetric key system whereby the customer creates his own key, and only the customer possesses a copy of his encryption key, RIM said.

The future of RIM and Blackberry devices in India remains unclear since the Indian government has been unwilling to accept any solution short of complete obedience with their intelligence agencies. Indian fears are not unfounded considering that the country has been a long sufferer of terrorism thanks to neighbouring Pakistan since the last 50 years.

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