Canadian firm, Research in Motion (RIM), which is the maker of popular BlackBerry family of smartphones, has set up a unit in India in order to assist the Indian authorities in monitoring data flowing through its devices.

The new unit in Mumbai will allow Indian investigators to carry out lawful surveillance of its BlackBerry services. The company had already allowed the government to access its consumer services, including its Messenger services but had kept the enterprise email out of monitoring.

The company had set up a unit in the country to handle surveillance requests from India. The investigators in the country can request the company for monitoring of a suspect and it will provide decoded messages for that individual if the request is legally authorized.

India can submit the name of a suspect its investigators want to wiretap, and RIM will return decoded messages for that individual, as long as it is satisfied the request has legal authorization, RIM said.

The unit will look into intercept requests for various services including BlackBerry Messenger chat service. The authorities in India have welcomed the opening of the unit but prefer to have the ability to decode the messages as it does not wish to disclose the name of the suspects to RIM.

The investigators in the country are still unable to decode messages sent through enterprise email, which is used by corporate customers and uses a highly complex encryption.