RIM finally agrees to set up server in India

Canada-based, Research in Motion (RIM), who're better known as the makers of the popular BlackBerry line of smartphones have, according to reports given in to the demands of the Indian government to set up servers in the country, affirms The Hindu. For those not in the know, the security agencies in the country found it difficult to monitor the brand's popular messaging service, BlackBerry Messenger, owing to the service's encrypted nature, giving the government sleepless nights. For over three years, the security agencies in the country have been trying to get the company to install local servers, so that they could access and monitor the stream of messages going back and forth to implement better security in the country. In one of our earlier reports, we had indicated that the government was very close to achieving this breakthrough move, but at that time, a confirmation was awaited.

The report further confirms that the server has been tested by the Department of Telecommunications (DoT), and the officials found it to be, what they referred to as a working solution. In addition to encrypted BBM service, the government was also mulling over the issue of the emails sent over one of RIM's other popular services, called the BlackBerry Enterprise Server. As a solution to this, the DoT has decided that it will resort to directly tapping into the corporate server in the country. This move comes in, especially after RIM stated that it was not possible to set up a local server in the country. Directly tapping into servers is certainly not going to be an easy task for the government, since RIM has roughly 5,000 enterprise servers in the country. Hence, the DoT has decided to involve the telecom operators to list down the servers, in a little over 2 weeks. According to the report, the DoT will share the details of the list with the Home Ministry, who will then share it with the security agencies in the country. Reportedly, the DoT will begin the same exercise with Nokia's intellisync e-mail, Microsoft Windows mobile active sync e-mail, Motorola's mobile messaging and Seven network mobile e-mail.

Among other steps taken by DoT to ensure that the security agencies have access to these messaging services, the DoT has come to a conclusion that all Internet-based messaging services operational in the country, like Yahoo! and Gmail, among others will have to be routed through servers in India. However, that they will be made compulsory, is still under doubt.