Banning the Blackberry in India…….

For the past couple of weeks, we have been witnessing a furore over the banning of BlackBerry services in India. Saudi Arabia and UAE have set the cat amongst the pigeons by doing so on security concerns, citing that the secured and encrypted messaging service offered by BlackBerry may be a favorite budding ground for terrorist networking. This may put national interests into serious jeopardy. India has asked RIM, the manufacturer of BlackBerry, to provide their proprietary codes so that Indian sleuths and ethical hackers can track messages that are being sent by the common man randomly, for the sake of “national interest.”

For God’s sake, I think the hierarchy need not be so insecure about its citizens out of the blue. There are much more pressing security issues that are yearning to be solved. The Constitution of India gives us the right to privacy and nobody has any business to eavesdrop on our personal conversations that we send through mobile phones. Besides that, technically speaking, the amount of raw data one much wade through to catch terrorists through phone conversations or messaging is impossible to handle in a country as vast and as talkative as India. In any case, intercepted phone chats are not exactly the sort of evidence that our honorable courts like to ratify.

To my humble knowledge, no terrorist has ever been caught with a BlackBerry. They use satellite phones. For the sake of argument, even if we ban BlackBerry or force open its encryption codes, there would be Skype and many more internet phone systems still open to the perpetrators of terror. By the time the government would ban these, new technologies would emerge. This is no secret that terrorists are shrewd and are always 2 steps ahead of law. Hence banning the BlackBerry would only hurt common people like you and I, who would now be sharing our private conversations with state-hired eavesdroppers. We may also get harassed by security agencies in their attempt to justify snooping. We do not want such a kind of nation, in the name of “national security.”

I need a new mobile handset for me pretty quickly anyway. If RIM refuses to cave in to the government’s demand, I would switch over to the BlackBerry to show my support for the cause. Right now, BlackBerry has come to represent my right to privacy and I am not going to give it up so easily. Nor should you.