Despite the partial ban on BlackBerry services that was just announced, Indian carrier Tata Teleservices has gone ahead and rolled them out anyway. Tata was the company that started the whole mess in India when they tried to get government certification for the release. Funnily enough, other operators like Bharti and Vodafone never bothered with certification and have had BlackBerrys on the market for a while. Tata is, understandably, distressed by the “significant loss of business opportunity and recurring revenues” they’ve suffered, and said as much in a letter to the Department of Telecom that is behind the ban. There’s no word on just how the Indian government has responded to the move, so the next few days should prove quite interesting.
Tag: ban
The Minister of State for Home Affairs, Sriprakash Jaiswal, has imposed upon all Indian carriers offering BlackBerry service to block any messaging directly between BlackBerrys while a method of legal interception is determined. That’s half-way to a ban that the government said wasn’t going to happen… The carriers’ response has been that the issue is between RIM and the Department of Telecom, and their services should not have to suffer because of it. Of course, the government feels otherwise:
“Our license agreement is with the Indian cellular operators and not with RIM. If any of the clause is flaunted we have to deal with the operators and not the Blackberry service provider,” DoT officials said.
This whole mess started back when a smaller carrier, Tata Teleservices, tried getting the credentials for BlackBerry service, and the government noticed a security gap. It’s tricky to see how this will all end, but if RIM can provide the information the government needs before the feds start to seriously hound carriers, this could all conclude peaceably.
When we heard that the French were against BlackBerrys for government use due to security concerns, we were a little confused: weren’t they designed to be secure devices for exactly this type of use? To recap, the French are worried that their intelligence data is vulnerable to interception by British and American operatives (data from French BlackBerrys is routed through severs at RIM NOCs in the US and UK). However, RIM says that to be successful, the culprits would have to use hundreds of computers running at over 100 GHz for millions of years.
An interesting article from World Politics Review sheds some light on the conflicting reports. Pointing to the French government’s previous attempts to halt iPod marketing in order to allow domestic companies to develop competitive technologies, WPR indicates that the French may be hoping that raising concerns about information transmitted over BlackBerrys would encourage more French people to rely on electronics manufactured and managed by French companies.
Apparently, it’s not working. The French media is reporting that the substitute device offered by the French government is not as efficient as the BlackBerry, leading some French civil servants to use their BlackBerrys in secret. It just goes to show that, despite political agendas, it’s hard to separate a government worker from their BlackBerry.
