India sets deadline for BlackBerry compliance

[CHIMO]

India piled fresh pressure on Research In Motion today when it gave the company less than three weeks to satisfy its concerns over its BlackBerry smartphones or face seeing some services banned.

Security fears over BlackBerry services in the country are thought to spring from the 2008 Mumbai terrorist attack in which 116 people died. Officials suspect the culprits used encrypted services on the device.

The Indian government has set RIM a deadline of the end of August to give it access to data transmitted by BlackBerry's email and messaging services. If the Canadian-based firm does not comply, Indian telecoms operators will be ordered to close the two services down.

"Our message to RIM and service providers is that if they don't come up with a technical solution by 31 August, then the home ministry will take a view and will shut down BlackBerry Messenger and business enterprises services," a spokesman for the ministry said.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/aug/12/blackberry-email-messaging-india

Well what else might one expect!

They just want what is possible and that others have.


As Gibbs Attacks Progressive Critics, ACLU Says Obama White House Enshrining Bush-Era Policies

JUAN GONZALEZ: What about the whole issue of the continued rise of the surveillance state and the government’s involvement in surveillance of civilians?

JAMEEL JAFFER: Yeah, I mean, I think that that’s another front where we had hoped to see this administration depart from the policies of the last administration. And it hasn’t happened, or at least hasn’t happened to the extent we had hoped. Some of what was going on under the last administration was going on in spite of federal law that prohibited it. That was true, for example, with the warrantless wiretapping program. And then Congress authorized the warrantless wiretapping that President Bush had authorized in violation of statute. So now you have a statute that authorizes precisely what President Bush was doing illegally between 2001 and 2006. But what we had hoped was that that statute would be tested, the constitutionality of that statute would be tested in the courts.

Rather than defend the statute on the merits or, even better, concede the unconstitutionality of the statute, the Obama administration has invoked the state secrets privilege and the standing doctrine to try to protect that statue from judicial review. And the standing argument they’re making is that the only people who can challenge this kind of surveillance are people who can prove that their own communications were acquired. And nobody can prove that their own communications were acquired, because the administration doesn’t—often for good reason, doesn’t disclose the names of its surveillance targets. So, to say that the only people who can challenge the statute are people who can show their communications were acquired under it is to say that the statute is immune from judicial review. And that’s the problem with the argument that the administration is making right now.

http://www.democracynow.org/2010/8/12/as_gibbs_attacks_progressive_critics_aclu