Govt hopes to resolve BlackBerry issue

The Indian government hopes to resolve the security issues related to services of Canada based Research In Motion (RIM), makers of BlackBerry smartphones.
The telecom Minister A Raja told reporters at the sidelines of a FICCI event on Tuesday, "I do hope it will be resolved."
He added, "We are periodically reviewing it."
Arguments regarding the ban of BlackBerry services have been doing the rounds for a while now.
The problem is that RIM sends the messages to and from a BlackBerry phone in an encrypted format and the Indian security agencies cannot monitor them since the servers of the company are in Canada. Hence, conversations between terrorists or anti social elements cannot be tracked by Indian security agencies.
The government had earlier threatened to ban BlackBerry if RIM failed to come up with tools to monitor the services by the end of August.
A statement issued by the Home Ministry on August 30, said, "RIM has made certain proposals for lawful access by law enforcement agencies and this would be operationalised immediately."
The statement added, "The feasibility of the solutions offered by RIM would be assessed within 60 days."
BlackBerry has about a million subscribers in India and the services are growing. Nine telecom operators including government owned BSNL and MTNL, Airtel, Vodafone, RCom and Tata Teleservices offer BlackBerry services.