Countdown for BlackBerry: 5 days to go

Aug 27, 2010 |

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Blackberry

Aug. 26: The government on Thursday made it clear that BlackBerry services may be banned if its maker, Research-in-Motion, fails to provide a monitoring solution in the next five days. “In case no solution is provided, those services which can not be intercepted and monitored in readable format may be banned by the government,” the minister of state for telecom, Mr Sachin Pilot, said in a written reply to the Rajya Sabha.

The Centre will take a call on allowing two popular BlackBerry services — the BlackBerry messenger (BBM) and BlackBerry enterprise service (BES) —on Monday when the Union home secretary, Mr G.K. Pillai, chairs a meeting with the security agencies to discuss the issue. The officials of RIM— makers of BlackBerry— who have flown down from Canada on Thursday held meetings with the security agencies and discussed the “technical solution” offered by them to allow legal interception of their mobile services by indian law enforcement agencies. No committment has been given by RIM on allowing legal interception of its BES service so far. RIM has conveyed to the home ministry that manual access will be allowed to the BBM from September 1.

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