The Indian government has given Research In Motion a period of two months to comply with government demands on access to traffic on RIM’s Blackberry network. We were following this dust-up a couple of weeks ago as it was playing out in the Gulf States and Saudi Arabia, which is a Gulf State too, now that I think about it. There is concern that crooks and terrorists are using the ultra-secure BB network to plot attacks or evade legitimate oversight on financial transactions, and these governments want RIM to do something that will allow monitoring of suspect traffic. RIM has said “no”, but it’s not clear if that’s an absolute no or a relative no. The governments in question are also annoyed that RIM is taking a resistant posture with them when it seems to have rolled over for similar demands by Western governments. After all, “sauce for the goose, sauce for the gander”.

India