KOLKATA/DELHI: The telecom department has just told the home ministry that Aditya Birla Group-promoted Idea Cellular’s monitoring solutions for the super-secure BlackBerry Internet Services (BIS) do not make the cut.
Idea Cellular, incidentally, is the only mobile phone company to have demonstrated interception solutions for BIS.
In an internal communique to the home ministry, the Department of Telecom (DoT) said that Idea’s encryption solution is ‘user-unfriendly’ as it fails to open any emails with .jpg attachments, coupled with the fact that all intercepted content is loaded with junk data.
“The email and web browsing interception mechanism demonstrated by Idea Cellular is not user-friendly as the intercepted content is embedded in undesirable junk data, making it difficult to locate the actual useful content in the intercepted email.
The system also could not open any emails with .jpg attachments. The company should be asked to provide the tools to open all email attachments, including those in .jpg formats,” notes a telecom department communique to the home ministry, which was reviewed by ET.
The telecom department also wants the home ministry to give companies like Nokia and Cisco the same treatment as BlackBerry by nudging them to demonstrate encryption solutions for their range of enterprise services offered in India.
“The home ministry should assess Nokia and Cisco’s compliance levels for their enterprise services, in so far as providing interception solutions in step with the requirements of the law enforcement agencies,” said a telecom department official with direct knowledge of the matter.
The latest developments come as Canada’s Research In Motion (RIM), the makers of the BlackBerry smartphone , edges closer to the end-January 2011 deadline of sharing the encryption keys and codes of its secure email and BlackBerry Messenger services with India’s security establishments.
In a customer update, aimed at allaying concerns of an impending ban, RIM asserts that it “continues to be as co-operative as possible with the government in the spirit of supporting legal and national security requirements.”
Source : Economic Times