Back in July, BlackBerry announced that it had entered into an agreement to acquire Secusmart GmbH, a leader in high-security voice and data encryption and anti-eavesdropping solutions for government organizations, enterprises and telecommunications service providers in Germany and internationally.
At the time, the managing director of Secusmart said that the German government would not raise any objections to BlackBerry’s planned acquisition of Secusmart.
Germany has now approved Blackberry’s planned acquisition of Secusmart.
“The German government has examined the planned purchase of Secusmart by BlackBerry and given its approval for it to go ahead,” it said on Friday, declining to confirm the conditions under which Berlin had given the green light.
According to a media report in Germany, BlackBerry and the German government have now entered into an “anti-espionage” agreement, where BlackBerry will,
“authorize the [German] Federal Office for Security to view and control the source code of the BlackBerry operating system. Reported vulnerabilities must notify the company of the federal government immediately.”
As many as 2,500 Blackberry devices are used by the German government official’s that have Secusmart encryption software in them.
A Secusmart microSD card is incorporated into the handset, which is inaccessible to hackers, and it stores the confidential information and acts as a separate hard drive
Despite its acquisition by BlackBerry, Secusmart development and production will remain in Germany.
Germany has reportedly also won assurances from BlackBerry that confidential information would not be passed on to foreign intelligence agencies.
