Safety measures

New Delhi, Aug. 8 (PTI): Security agencies have not shown any eagerness to accept BlackBerry’s offer of providing “metadata” and other relevant information to help them in intercepting data sent through the device.

According to minutes of a meeting between government officials and Canadian firm Research in Motion (RIM) — the makers of BlackBerry — BlackBerry mobile device sends an encrypted email to a BlackBerry enterprise server located with the service provider.

The server decrypts the messages and sends it to the email server of the service provider where it remains stored in a decrypted form before being pushed to the BlackBerry device in an encrypted form.

After some persuasion, the representatives agreed that “they can provide the metadata of the message such as Internet Protocol address of BlackBerry enterprise server and PIN and International Mobile Equipment Identity of the BlackBerry mobile”, sources said.

Metadata is loosely defined as data about data. It provides information about a certain item’s content such as the largeness of the picture, the colour depth, the image resolution and when the image was created.

A text document’s metadata may contain information about how long the document is, who the author is, when the document was written and a short summary of the document. However, the sources said RIM, which had nearly one million subscribers in India, failed to enthuse the security agencies who wanted an uninterrupted access to the messaging services on the BlackBerry platform.

Saudi move

Saudi Arabia and RIM are testing three servers in the kingdom to resolve a row over the Canadian firm’s messaging service, a regulatory official said.

“Three servers are being tested, one for each of the three mobile operators. We’re waiting for feedback (from the telecom firms),” said an from the Communications and Information Technology Commission’s technical department.