Pages

Saturday, September 4, 2010

Ban on BlackBerry

Ban on BlackBerry
According to multiple resources, last month india threatened Research in Motion (RIM), the maker of the BlackBerry smartphones to address its security concerns or face having its services suspended. India has asked for encrypted BlackBerry communications to be made easily available to its intelligence and law enforcement agencies, saying that the services could be used by militant groups to carry out attacks.

Many reports suggested that Indai also considering request to Google Inc, Skype Inc and Other online service providers to allow the country's law enforcement agencies access to private communications on their network. India is not the only country to have expressed concerns over BlackBerry's encrypted channels. The list includes countries like Russia, China, Indonesia, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and UAE.

The popularity of the device has put governments around the world in quite a predicament, do they want to be the advocates of freedom of expression of show disregards for it in order to protect their national interests. According to Research in Motion (RIM), the canadian maker of the BlackBerry, the company has invested almost ten years to build a very strong security architecture that meets the secuirty requirements of its enterprise customers. The company claims the encryption is so strong that no one, not even RIM, can decrypt it.

With everything being said and don, what BlackBerry is doing, that is encrypting channels to protect user data is nothing new or unique. E-mails sent by Gmail are reportedly encrypted. Also , there are various other technology providers that operate from servers based in other countries. So why BlackBerry? Analysts suspect that BlackBerry's growing popularity and its instant availability has the goverments worried.

No comments:

Post a Comment