RIM’s adventures in international security continue today as the International Telecommunication Union, an agency of the United Nations, said BlackBerry data should be shared with the world’s governments as needed. In regards to the security demands made by Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, India, and others for lawful interception of full text e-mails , Secretary-General Hamadoun Toure said “Those are genuine requests. There is a need for cooperation between governments and the private sector on security issues.” One might say that RIM is already on the same page, having already proposed an industry forum specifically for that purpose.
Even though the UN has no direct say in how these events unfold, their stance adds pressure on RIM to cooperate with whatever security demands international governments may have of BlackBerry communications. This isn’t to say RIM has been uncooperative so far, but they have been fairly firm that enterprise communications are outside of their reach, though even that might not be entirely true. Specifics are slim about the solutions that have been deployed so far, but in India’s case, there was a rumour that decrypted e-mails would be shunted from corporate e-mail servers to service providers after they had gone through BlackBerrys. Solutions like that have more to do with local providers than RIM, which makes me wonder why they’re getting so much heat over this situation. There are other issues about censorship, like Indonesia seeking to ban BlackBerry porn that equally don’t concern RIM so much as the carriers that sell the devices and provide service.
[via AP]