It looks like RIM and India have made some headway recently as RIM has agreed to offer monitoring on cloud-based computing instead of setting up a local server and the Ministry of Home Affairs has agreed to this solution. In a letter to the Ministry of Home Affairs, the Vice-President (Government Relations) of RIM, Mr Robert Crow, said, “As per the compliance schedule agreed to by both Research In Motion and the Ministry of Home Affairs, RIM infrastructure is ready to receive and process via the cloud computing-based system lawfully intercepted BlackBerry Messenger data from Indian service providers.”
When we last read about the India and RIM affair, the BlackBerry ban warning had been extended to January 31st, 2011, and RIM said that India could have “manual access” to BBM. This wasn’t an acceptable solution for the Indian government because they wanted real-time monitoring capabilities.
Even though it’s not totally clear how this new cloud-based solution will work, it does look like it might set a precedent for other countries wanting access to BBM. Corporate email is still secure in India, but the government could start to work on trying to access this information as well. At some point, national security is going to have to take a back seat to economic and personal privacy issues.
