Following a meeting with the makers on Monday, Home Ministry officials gave BlackBerry a two-month reprieve. BlackBerry services earlier deadline to fall in line or else face closure would have ended on Tuesday.
BlackBerry’s owners, Canada based Research in Motion, were given time to
assess the feasibility of the interception solutions they had offered. To ward off any insinuations that it was targeting BlackBerry services alone, the ministry has decided to widen its net and ask other firms like Skype and Google to also provide access to their instant messaging services.
“RIM have made certain proposals for lawful access by law enforcement agencies and these will be operationalised immediately. The feasibility will be assessed thereafter,” a home ministry spokesperson said.
The solutions covered BlackBerry Enterprise Server as well as BlackBerry Messenger, the two services that so far cannot be intercepted by intelligence agencies, and which they fear could be misused by terrorist elements.