RIM Offers Monitoring Tools to India Which Includes Third Party Apps

Posted 08/15/2010 at 10:56am | by Justin Kerr

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One of the Blackberry’s number one selling features has just turned into a major negative, at least if the trend overseas continues. The hallmark of RIM’s success has always been its push notification and messaging services that are unmatched in the wireless industry, unfortunately, RIM also put itself in a position where it was handling all of the messaging traffic going across the network. This allowed them to offer unmatched end to end encryption, but has also now become a tempting target for governments wishing to snoop on the private data of its citizens, and RIM is co-operating.

According to notes obtained by the Wall Street Journal, negotiations between Research in Motion and India on July 26 set the framework for unfettered access to all messaging services, including those offered by third parties such as Gmail. RIM issued a statement on Thursday in an attempt to reassure its customers that it was negotiating with foreign governments "in the spirit of supporting legal and national security requirements, while also preserving the lawful needs of citizens and corporations." It is unclear if RIM is still willing to relocate servers to government run facilities upon request, but it seems they are willing to do whatever it takes to avoid getting shut down.

Either way it appears as though governments will soon have the right to eavesdrop on secure communications sent over a Blackberry, let’s just hope it doesn’t open the floodgates.