Indian Government now has Blackberry Messenger Access

The Blackberry ban situation in India has seemingly reached an amicable solution, according to reports. Canadian mobile company RIM has finally heeded the Indian Government’s demands and has provided access to users’ Blackberry Messenger data.

Big Brother is watching you chat.

The dispute started way back in August, which means the issue has been drawn out for about 5 months now. The Indian Government had threatened to ban RIM, demanding e-mail and BlackBerry Messenger access if Blackberry had to continue competing in the Indian market. Once RIM replied with what was basically a “no entry” sign, stating it was impossible for even them to give India the encryption key, the Govn’t flew into rage, setting a deadline for unencrypted access.

Now it looks like RIM actually delivered before the deadline - and a couple of weeks early to boot. The Government will now be able to monitor your Blackberry Messenger chats at any time, which is not a very pleasant feeling, but this precautionary measure might just save a lot of people’s lives in the future.

RIM, in a customer update, had this to say. “The lawful access capability now available to RIM’s carrier partners meets the standard required by the government of India for all consumer messaging services offered in the Indian marketplace. We also wish to underscore, once again, that this enablement of lawful access does not extend to BlackBerry Enterprise Server [corporate email], which is essentially an enterprise VPN solution.”

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