RIM opens new surveillance facility in India

London, Oct 28: Research In Motion (RIM) has established a facility in Mumbai to help the Indian government carry out lawful surveillance of its BlackBerry services including the BB Messenger chat service, said the

.

In January this year, RIM gave India access to its consumer services after authorities raised security concerns, but said that it could not allow monitoring of its enterprise email.

From now India can submit the name of a suspect its investigators want to wiretap and RIM will return decoded messages for that individual, as long as it is satisfied that the request has legal authorization, sad the Wall Street Journal. But the service will not be available beyond the business hours.

According to the Journal, India took the BB move as a positive step, but would prefer an arrangement where it has the ability to decode messages itself, so that it can conduct surveillance without disclosing the names of suspects to RIM.

India still has no method to intercept and decode BlackBerry enterprise email, which is used by corporate customers and features a higher level of encryption than consumer email and instant messaging, the report said.

OneIndia News