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NEW DELHI: Toughening its stand, the government has conveyed to the BlackBerry makers to install its server in India for tracking its messenger and enterprise mail service as the offer made by it to provide data from its Canada-based server could be detrimental to national security.
Officials of BlackBerry maker RIM (Research In Motion) had offered to provide information on a deferred basis after it faced the threat of a shutdown of the core features by August 31 if security agencies cannot gain access to heavily encrypted corporate email sent on a Blackberry handset.
The RIM had provided an option to the security agencies and officials of the Home Ministry that they could hand over the details of BlackBerry phones needed to be monitored and the firm in turn will decrypt the BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) and BlackBerry Enterprise mail Service (BES) of the smartphones in question, sources in the Telecom Ministry said.
The RIM officials were ready to provide the information initially manually and later through a non-human interface using the "cloud computing environment" method under which a separate wall created in the server and code and pass-code is handed over to the overall coordinator, in this case India, the sources said.
However, the proposal was rejected prima facie as security agencies claimed that handing over telephone numbers for monitoring was fraught with the danger of exposing the source to an outside company and thus can be detrimental to country's security, the sources said.
Even the automated system of extracting information from Canada-based server was not free of danger because the information could be hacked midway, the sources said.
