I have never seen a more arrogant company than RIM, they think they want to make the world a better place, and they somehow are free to do whatever they think right in countries where they operate in. They think it’s within their rights to lecture these countries, and lie to them about what RIM can and can’t do. Here’s a little piece from a Bloomberg article:

RIM company maintains a “consistent global standard” for lawful access to its messaging system which “does not include special deals for specific countries,” the company said last week, reiterating an Aug. 4 statement. It also reaffirmed it can’t meet requests from governments for codes to users’ data because the BlackBerry corporate service was designed to prevent RIM, or anyone else, from being able to read encrypted information.

Let us dissect the above statement:

– “Consistent global standard”: Good luck with applying this concept. Ask Google how well this philosophy worked for them.
– “Lawful access”: As far as I know and so far, only countries have asked to have access to their own users’ data. Do the RIM people think that some countries are requesting unlawful access. And who defines unlawful access anyway? RIM? Has RIM become so strong and so big now that it thinks it has the right to act as a legal entity.
– “RIM unable to read users’ encrypted information”: As someone who has been programming all his life, I can safely tell you that this is a complete and utter lie. If you have the encrypted data of your OWN system, there is no way you’re unable to decrypt it. Think about it this way, at one point, the data has to be decrypted so that it can be read by the end user. It can be decrypted on the user’s blackberry and it can be very well decrypted on one of RIM’s servers. This is a rule: If you have the data, and if you’re the one who built the system (which is RIM’s case) you should be able to always find a way to decrypt it. Even if RIM claim that they don’t store encryption keys for users (which is something I don’t believe), they can start storing them as of this moment (the next time any user handshakes with their system).

RIM’s arrogance and stupidity are now at new lows, they don’t think about their investors, they think that they can challenge countries (hold on cowboys, even Google couldn’t do it, and lost it all to Baidu, and you’re still 15% of Google’s size), and they think they can get away with it as long as the Canadian government is behind them.

The stock has lost 18% of its value this month alone, and is poised to lose more, until RIM’s executive team is completely replaced with rational people. RIMM is trading in the pre-market at $46.29 down from around $57 the beginning of this month.

India will decide tomorrow on the fate of RIM’s operations, of course, had RIM been logical and flexible, we would have never been at this stage. India has a population of 1.14 billion (but apparently is not large enough to be taken seriously by RIM).