Industry backs RIM offer to Indian government

A PROPOSED INDUSTRY FORUM is the olive branch Research in Motion (RIM) is offering the Indian government to find a solution to the country's demand to monitor encrypted email and instant messaging traffic.

Welcomed by analysts are the firm's hopes that its capitulation will be sufficient to dissuade the Indian government from making good its threat to suspend RIM's services in the country by a 31 August deadline.

Lief-Olof Wallin, a research VP at Gartner said that RIM's move was "very smart" as it highlighted the importance of data security to both the business world in general and, more pertinently, the Indian economy.

We are not exactly sure quite how opening up all of its customers' supposedly secure communications to India's spooks, er, national surveillance agencies in real time without any legal due process whatsoever counts as protecting them, but maybe we have missed something.

"Enterprises need their data to be encrypted. There are plenty of other services firms could use if RIM was banned that would just create the same issue but with a different company," he said.

"Furthermore, so much of Indian business in health, finance and insurance relies on corporations being assured data is encrypted on services like BlackBerry that it would be damaging to a host of enterprises if a general ban [on encrypted communications] was to be implemented too."

Wallin said there was a strong case to be made for a forum such the one being proposed by RIM.

"Creating a series of industry policies and lawful intercept procedures for dealing with encrypted data is a much better way of addressing the issue governments are facing," he added. µ