RIM close to solving Indian government problem

RIM risks alienating its enterprise customers with any potential deal

Research in Motion (RIM) is set to give the Indian government the ability to access corporate BlackBerry emails sent as encrypted data before the end of the week, in order to avoid a ban on the service in the country.

A Reuters report claims that a government source has said the firm will provide a solution before the 31 August deadline, with a technical team from RIM working with the department of telecoms and security agencies in New Delhi to solve the issue.

"We are expecting they will come up with some solution for Enterprise mail next week," the unnamed source is reported as saying.

V3.co.uk contacted RIM for a statement on the matter but it said it had no comment to make at this time.

The Indian authorities want to be able to monitor traffic sent between BlackBerry devices as part of their efforts to thwart terrorist activities, and will reportedly demand similar concessions from firms such as Google and Skype.

Last week, RIM was told that its Messenger service would be allowed to run as normal after the government was satisfied that the firm was making every effort to provide access to the information, but the email service was still a concern.

The issue over accessing encrypted data has been rumbling on for several weeks after various nations around the world including Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Lebanon and Kuwait all said they wanted access to data being sent.

RIM had repeatedly stressed it is unable to provide BES encryption keys to governments, claiming that even it does not have the ability to decrypt the data, but the latest reports suggest it is prepared to allow governments to monitor BlackBerry enterprise communications, if not the content of these messages.

A full round-up of the issue and the context around it can be read here.