RIM's Lazaridis halts BBC interview in echoes of Apple PR Fail

It seems that all the talk of RIM's problems in the Middle East and India has become too much for the BlackBerry maker, after chief executive Mike Lazaridis and his PR team halted an interview with the BBC after balking at some pretty innocuous questions.

Taking a leaf out of the Apple way to conduct interviews with national broadcast media, RIM objected to Rory Cellan-Jones's question of whether its well publicised disputes with various governments were any closer to being resolved.

"That's not fair. You implied we had a security problem," said Lazaridis. "We've just been singled out because we're so successful around the world. It's an iconic product."

Apple's much-hated PR team, of course, famously halted an interview with Channel 4 when its own presenter was unceremoniously stopped mid-question for wandering off topic.

To be fair to RIM it is in a pretty tricky spot right now. On the one hand it has accrued a well deserved reputation for having probably the most secure enterprise communications platform on the market, something confirmed by GCHQ this week.

However, on the other it is being forced by various governments such as India's to allow access to the encrypted communications streams of its users, as these regimes look to clamp down on terrorist activity, social disobedience or whatever.

RIM cannot comply with these requests because under the BES model the individual enterprise holds the encryption keys needed to monitor such conversations, not RIM itself. If it did change this model RIM could lose the hard earned respect of CISOs the world over.

RIM's big mistake in this BBC interview, then, is coming across like a petulant child.

Lazaridis seems happy to shout about the security of BES but, when pushed on whether he can guarantee RIM users in threatened countries that their service would not be interrupted - a reasonable request if you're one such worried enterprise, I would assume - the firm simply closes ranks and the interview is ended.

This was the BBC Click team too - hardly on the same scale as a Paxman Newsnight grilling.