Yes, nearly a month after UAE announced to ban e-mail, web browsing and messaging for the BlackBerry smartphone citing national security concerns, India seems to be following suit due to concerns about terrorism.
As stated by Mohammed al-Ghanem, the chief of the UAE’s Telecommunications Regulatory Authority:
The decision is based on the fact that, in their current form, certain BlackBerry services allow users to act without any legal accountability, causing judicial, social and national-security concerns.
Blackberry a product from the SmartPhone maker Research In Motion Ltd, now faces a similar threat from India’s Department of Telecommunications, which according to a WSJ report, is testing the monitoring of some services provided by BlackBerry currently and is expected to hand back the report in a month.
So why a sudden surge across nations to ban BlackBerry’s services and how could it possibly be compromising national security? Here’s what makes Blackberry a strong and powerful weapon for the anti-social elements.
The e-mail and messenger services provided by BlackBerry handle data in highly advanced encrypted form. The data is routed overseas through the Canada based company’s networks and this makes it impossible for nations to monitor the encrypted form.
The encryption methods employed by RIM were developed keeping in mind the security of confidential-corporate business data and to ensure user privacy. But this has un-intentionally led towards making BlackBerry a useful weapon among terrorists to exchange information without the fear of a Government interception.The Mumbai Terror Attacks of 2008 are a recent reminder, when Indian Commandos went inside the hotels after the incident, they were not only surprised to find the devices in the terrorists’ rucksacks, but also to come across the fact that the device was used to monitor the Indian Media for inside information and real-time access to the outside developments.
RIM has in the past offered help to monitor internet surfing and messenger services on the BlackBerry to aid terror investigations but it has clearly stated as before that it’s practically impossible to intercept corporate e-mails sent via BlackBerry since no such Technology exists currently.
It’s a known fact that India has been under constant threats and attacks from domestic as well as foreign sources for quite some time and the situation doesn’t seem to be improving in the near future. Considering a scenario like this, continuing BlackBerry’s services uninterrupted does not seem to be the best bet as far as National security is concerned. On the other hand, shutting down a major corporate enterprise completely would definitely not go down well with other foreign investors planning to invest in the county which has possibly the world’s fastest growing technical sector.
What happens next, only time will tell but where does this battle takes us to would be interesting to see.
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