Blackberry Refuses To Spy For India

Research In Motion, the company that makes the Blackberry phone, has refused demands by the Indian government to decrypt suspicious text messages.

There are only around 115,000 Blackberry users in India, but they’re causing the government a problem. It seems that the country’s security services and department of technology haven’t been able to unencrypt text messages sent on the Blackberry, and they’ve asked Research In Motion (RIM), the Canadian company that makes the device, for the master key, worrying that criminals and terrorists might take to the device.

They’d expected co-operation, but they’ve been met with a refusal. RIM claims that its technology prevents any third party – even the company itself – from reading messages sent over the network. In The Times of India RIM was quoted as saying:

"The Blackberry security architecture for enterprise customers is purposefully designed to exclude the capability for Research in Motion (RIM) or any third party to read encrypted information under any circumstances."

India is joining other countries in its worries about being able to crack texts on the Blackberry.