Threats by the governments of India, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia to shut down BlackBerry’s corporate e-mail services reflect unease about a technology that the U.S. government also took a while to accept.
The foreign governments are essentially a decade behind in coming to terms with encryption, a technology that’s fundamental to the Internet as a medium of commerce.
Encrypted communications are scrambled in a complex process to ensure that only the intended recipient can read them, using the proper digital key. This often takes place behind the scenes, without the user needing to do anything. When a shopper submits a credit card number on a shopping site, for example, the communication is encrypted. When consumers log on to their bank’s site, that connection is encrypted as well.
Most companies use encrypted connections for their corporate e-mails, at least if employees need to access e-mail outside the office through virtual private networks and other secure systems. One of the reasons Research In Motion Ltd. has been so successful with its BlackBerry phones is that it brought that level of security to e-mail-capable phones.
Encryption, however, poses a problem for law enforcement officials. They can intercept encrypted messages, but can’t read them unless the encryption is poor and agents have vast computer resources to use in unscrambling them. Traditional investigative tools such as wiretaps don’t work. Canada’s RIM and other technology companies stress that they agree to legal requests from law enforcement, but in RIM’s case, it can’t decrypt the messages on its corporate e-mail service.
BlackBerrys seem to have been singled out by foreign governments because the devices provide an easy and convenient way to communicate securely. But there are many other ways to communicate in an encrypted fashion, and any government that’s serious about squelching encrypted communications would need to go after…