India Testing BlackBerry Monitoring

A technical team from India's Department of Telecommunications is testing the monitoring of some services provided by BlackBerry smart-phone maker Research In Motion Ltd. and is expected to report back in a month, a top bureaucrat said.

India's government has been concerned about corporate email services such as those running on Canada-based Research In Motion's BlackBerry smart-phones. India fears that the highly encrypted e-mails sent through the devices make them convenient for terrorists to use undetected. "The solutions offered are for different aspects of security concerns," Telecom Secretary R. Chandrashekhar said, without specifying the services for which the company has offered solutions. While the BlackBerry maker has already offered systems to monitor Internet browsing and messenger services used on its smart-phones, it maintains that intercepting corporate e-mails is impossible as there is no technology available to allow monitoring of the service.