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NSA supervising Blackberry solution talks

Fri-Jul 11, 2008

New Delhi / Press Trust of India

The National Security Adviser is now supervising the discussion to find a solution to the controversial Blackberry services, over which agencies have raised serious security concerns.

NSA is overseeing the National Test Research Organisation (NTRO) and along with the Department of Telecom (DoT) is holding with talks with smartphone-maker Blackberry to find a solution where the data traffic passing through the Canadian firm's network could be intercepted by security agencies.

"The  National Test Research Organisation (NTRO), under the supervision of NSA, is interacting with Blackberry. The Department of Telecom is also engaged in talks," informed Communications Minister A Raja.

So far the government has been insisting to have a local server to host emails in India, but Research-In-Motion, the makers of Blackberry, has cited problems in setting up country-specific servers.

The government is now also evaluating the impact of such a server on the company, which has a central server in Canada.

"We are insisting for a (Blackberry) server in India to take care of the security agencies' concerns. But technically and commercially what will be the impact on Blackberry also has to be taken into consideration and it is being taken," he said.

At present, India has over one lakh Blackberry customers between five operators Bharti Airtel, BPL, Vodafone Essar, Reliance Communications and Idea Cellular.

Other alternate options which have been discussed are to reduce Blackberry's encryption standards to 40-bits from the current 256 bits, the possibility of asking RIM and operators to create a mirror image of all e-mails and data sent on Blackberry in India and save them for a minimum period of six months to address the concerns of security agencies.

Raja had earlier said the government was also looking at solutions offered by third-parties.

Meanwhile, some international firms such as Cain Technologies, Cleartrail and SS8 Networks have also offered to provide solutions to monitor BlackBerry services.
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