India closes in on Blackberry surveillance

APPARENTLY NOT SATISFIED to gain access to the Blackberry messaging application, the Indian government is now leaning on Research in Motion (RIM) and demanding its users' emails as well.

Firmly cementing its nosey parker status, the paranoid Indian government has contacted the Canadian company again, according to Reuters, which has it according to a source.

"They have started giving us access to messenger service from September 1," the source told a Reuters correspondent. "Discussions are under way so that we get access to the other service which is corporate email so that we can read it in readable format."

This 1 September date is important as apparently it is the date that RIM acquiesced, or rather submitted, to the Indian government's demands for access to its customers' messaging traffic.

The last we heard, the Indian government was giving RIM a sixty day discussion period, so at some point, somewhere, things must have stepped up a little. And for the life of us, we cannot work out why the Indian spooks didn't insist on access to both instant messages and emails in the first place.

Perhaps though there is a clue in the statement, which says that they want access to emails in a readable format. This might suggest that RIM handed over its encryption keys for messaging but not for emails.

We couldn't dig out a contact for the Indian government press department, but we have sent a friend of ours a message over there about the whole thing so, fingers crossed, it might get to the right people anyway. µ