RIM said it will be unable to give the Indian Government access to their corporate e-mail service, called BlackBerry Enterprise Server, as The Wall Street Journal reports. A BlackBerry representative, Robert Crow, who is in the country, has stated it is not possible for them to give the government access to secure emails of corporations who use their enterprise services as the encryption keys that protect these mails are with the ones who use them, and not RIM. RIM did give into the government snooping on their BlackBerry Instant Messenger (BBM) chat application earlier this month. This was possible presumably as RIM itself was hosting all the conversations between BlackBerry users on its own servers.
The government's need to monitor such protected forms of communications is simply due to the fear of terrorists exploiting it. This fear is not just of the Indian government, but of a few other countries in Asia and the Middle East too.
