Edunology - Saumya Aggarwal

DOT radar now on Nokia push mail services

After partially getting RIM to allow them monitoring access to the BlackBerry Mail service, the Government of India has turned its attention to Nokia's Push Mail services. The government wants Nokia to set up a method that will allow government and security agencies to access telephone numbers, device ids, email IDs, IP addresses and keywords, on a real time basis. This is much in line with what RIM had to do, recently.

RIM integrated a satisfactory solution to intercept the enterprise mail services, which has been already expired. After a comfortable run for such activated services for the consumers, DoT has decided to clamp down on communication via channels like the Blackberry Enterprise push mail services, calling it a security risk. The security agencies want access to all incoming or outgoing content, both to monitor communication and to help track certain communication, in the interest of national security.

Now with Nokia, the government demands the implementation of a necessary framework suggested by the telecom and the IT department, a framework that will soon finds its way into the Indian Telegraphy Act of 1885 and the Information Technology (Amendment) Act of 2007. It will also be ensuring operator compliance with demands of security agencies.

Nokia has not responded until this time, and must be busy weighing the available options on how to implement the necessary framework. In the past however, Nokia had said it would cooperate with the Indian goverment, and that its push mail servers would comply with the demands.