We’ve been talking extensively about Research In Motion lately, outlining their recent “interactions” with governments in countries like Saudi Arabia and India. BlackBerry service has been routinely threatened in several countries due to “security” issues, with varying stages of concessions offered by the Waterloo company in efforts to stay in business in the respective nations.
At the core of the difficulties in India are issues over security requirements, of course. For the Saudis, many of the issues surround BlackBerry Messenger and “lawful interception” of data sent over the mobile devices. With similar problems in the United Arab Emirates as well, RIM finally delivered a statement, notably in the form of a “customer statement,” of intent in the form of a quartet of basic “points of lawful access.”
The four points outline the circumstances under which RIM would allow federal governments the ability to access the communications data of BlackBerry devices in the countries of question. It is a way of clarifying the confusion, I suppose, but it’s probably too early to say that this is actually a definitive statement of intent for the company with respect to dealing with foreign government authorities with strange concepts of privacy and individual freedoms.
RIM’s four principles are as follows:
- The carriers’ capabilities be limited to the strict context of lawful access and national security requirements as governed by the country’s judicial oversight and rules of law.
- The carriers’ capabilities must be technology and vendor neutral, allowing no greater access to BlackBerry consumer services than the carriers and regulators already impose on RIM’s competitors and other similar communications technology companies.
- No changes to the security architecture for BlackBerry Enterprise Server customer since, contrary to any rumors, the security architecture is the same around the world and RIM truly has no ability to provide its customers’ encryption keys. Also driving RIM’s position is the fact that strong encryption is a fundamental commercial requirement for any country to attract and maintain international business anyway and similarly strong encryption is currently used pervasively in traditional VPNs on both wired and wireless networks in order to protect corporate and government communications.
- RIM maintains a consistent global standard for lawful access requirements that does not include special deals for specific countries.
In many ways, RIM is “refusing” to make special concessions – at least publicly. We already know that there have been many negotiations with “specific countries.” Sure, these “principles” could be a way of answering the demands collectively, but I doubt negotiations have broken down to such a point. Not for nothing, but these “principles” are probably more for our benefit than for the benefit(s) of foreign countries interesting in RIM’s concessions stand.
It could be the natural cynic in me, but these principles seem to be RIM’s way of telling us that they aren’t capitulating to unruly foreign authorities with questionable security ideals without giving it some serious thought. They aren’t merely “playing ball,” you see, and these “principles” tell us that.
Of course, what happens behind closed doors in India and Saudi Arabia could very well tell different stories.
Photo c/o NWAA.
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Written by: Jordan Richardson. www.digitcom.ca >. Follow TheTelecomBlog.com > by: RSS >, Twitter >, Identi.ca >, or Friendfeed >
