RIM reportedly working with India to avoid BlackBerry ban
There were reports as late as this morning that RIM was remaining "defiant" over the looming (and recurring) BlackBerry ban in India and not willing to cut any "special deals," but it looks like that may not be the case after all -- Reuters is reporting that RIM has assured India that it will provide a "technical solution" sometime next week. That's presumably similar to the arrangement RIM recently worked out with Saudi Arabia, but India still isn't making any final decisions just yet, with a government source simply saying that its "technical team will evaluate if it works." Somewhat curiously, the source also mentioned that India had "concerns" about Gmail and Skype, but didn't offer any further details.
For its part, RIM has issued a customer update that outlines the four main principles that govern the capabilities it provides to carriers for "lawful access purposes." Head on past the break for the complete statement.
In response to the statement published today by the Government of India, and further to RIM's Customer Update dated August 2, RIM wishes to provide this additional information to its customers. Although RIM cannot disclose confidential regulatory discussions that take place with any government, RIM assures its customers that it genuinely tries to be as cooperative as possible with governments in the spirit of supporting legal and national security requirements, while also preserving the lawful needs of citizens and corporations. RIM has drawn a firm line by insisting that any capabilities it provides to carriers for "lawful" access purposes be limited by four main principles:
1. The carriers' capabilities be limited to the strict context of lawful access and national security requirements as governed by the country's judicial oversight and rules of law.
2. The carriers' capabilities must be technology and vendor neutral, allowing no greater access to BlackBerry consumer services than the carriers and regulators already impose on RIM's competitors and other similar communications technology companies.
3. No changes to the security architecture for BlackBerry Enterprise Server customers since, contrary to any rumors, the security architecture is the same around the world and RIM truly has no ability to provide its customers' encryption keys. Also driving RIM's position is the fact that strong encryption is a fundamental commercial requirement for any country to attract and maintain international business anyway and similarly strong encryption is currently used pervasively in traditional VPNs on both wired and wireless networks in order to protect corporate and government communications.
4. RIM maintains a consistent global standard for lawful access requirements that does not include special deals for specific countries.
