The Canadian makers of BlackBerry — Research in Motion — have assured the government of providing interception facilities to its BlackBerry Enterprise (BES) services.
From a stalemate over the issues for the last six months, a senior government official said, there has now been progress in arriving at a solution where the BES service
will be able to be legally intercepted by Indian law enforcement agencies. Preliminary meetings of BES officials with the technical group consisting of officials of the department of telecom, IB, national technical research organisation have been successful and a second round of discussion is expected to take place by November end.
A top Canadian intelligence official is expected
to visit India soon where the BlackBerry issue is expected to be discussed with senior government officials.
Government sources said that the DoT has also issued notices to google, skype asking them to provide interception facilities of its Internet services.
“The discussions are a very preliminary stage but the RIM has given assurances saying they will be able to make records available from their server. In principle it should be possible,” an official said.
The government had recently extended the deadline for the Blackberry Messanger Service (BBM) after the RIM agreed to provide a solution for the lawful interception of its messenger services by January 2011.