DoT's Blackberry woes

After almost 4 years since it was first launched, Blackberry services have suddenly come under the Government's scanner for not meeting security related monitoring requirements. Does that mean that all these past 4 years Blackberry services were not monitored and could have been used by anti social elements? Even if one were to assume that DoT has woken up just now to the issue, why threaten to ban it if the company (Research In Motion) did not give the codes for decryption. The demand from DoT is absurd on three counts. First no company will give away its patented codes to a leaky Government department. Second, under the existing rules, the procedure for submitting coded keys have not been laid out. So even if RIM were to be bold enough to give the code, they would not know how to. The third and the larger issue is that this could open up a Pandora's box for all e-commerce, m-commerce and Internet based transactions in future wherein every one will have to give the codes to the security agencies. Today people buy anything from a railway ticket to mobile top up cards to withdraw cash using the Internet. Has DoT taken the codes from all these companies? The encryption laws in the country are archaic that it does not permit anyone to use more than a 40 bit encrypt code. That's way too low for e-commerce applications. For example Government run Railways itself uses more than 200 bit encryption for its online ticketing application. Its time that the Government takes a re look at these laws and moves ahead with technology. Meanwhile for resolving the Blackberry controversy maybe the DoT can consider asking all the major email service providers to set up a local server in India which can be used by the security agencies to snoop around.