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BlackBerry Exits Pakistan Amid User Privacy Concerns (blackberry.com)

Posted by timothy on from the where-are-you-and-for-how-long? dept.

An anonymous reader writes: BlackBerry has announced that it will pull its operations in Pakistan from today, quoting a recent government notice which read that the company would not be permitted to continue its services in the country after December for 'security reasons.' In a blog post released by BlackBerry today, chief operating officer Marty Beard confirmed the decision: 'The truth is that the Pakistani government wanted the ability to monitor all BlackBerry Enterprise Service traffic in the country, including every BES e-mail and BES BBM message.' He added: 'BlackBerry will not comply with that sort of directive.'

1 of 71 comments (clear)

  1. BES was kicked out, not pulling out. by BCGlorfindel · · Score: 3, Informative

    Phone access != BES access.

    They may not give 2 shits about you or your privacy but they sure give a shit about their BES deployments. As the first comment pointed out, WE aren't their customers. Corporations spending millions on BES are their customers. Selling backdoored *phones* is a core part of their business model to go right along with BES. So yes, they are happy to give LEO the same backdoor access your IT manager has but they won't give out the keys to the kingdom for BES.

    This!

    Pakistan was in love with Blackberry for the longest time for exactly this reason because they liked having a central BES server to make the job of the ISI easier to collect everyone's communications. Then back in July Pakistan announced it was kicking Blackberry out of the country, by November 30th(today).

    From what I've followed of Pakistani news it looks like this was the flow of things. The Pakistani government spent a long time requiring anybody in government or important had to run Blackberry on the government controlled BES server so that everyone could be watched. Since GW Bush gave them his cowboy speech, their military government relaxed things a bit and gave civilian government control back again for the first meaningful length of time in the country's history. During that time the civilian government also liked keeping tabs on everyone, but also opened up telecoms ability to do their own thing. This led to telecoms running their own private BES systems. The Taliban then had an affordable encrypted communications channel that they could use for planning attacks on Pakistani cities. It's even odds whether the Taliban or civilian use of the private BES systems was the REAL reason the government decided to crack down, but Pakistan announced it's decision back in July that Blackberry had gone from golden boy to unwelcome and would be banned from use by the country's private ISP's today.

    In short, Blackberry would like to spin this as them taking a stand, but it's really just them losing a big customer.