Slashdot Mirror
BlackBerry Exits Pakistan Amid User Privacy Concerns (blackberry.com)
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.'
Hooray for Blackberry. I wish more corporations had a even tiny little smidgen of ethics. Oh, and stop calling me an effing "consumer"!!! Corporations work for the banks nowadays. That is their "customer".
Dear Microlimp: I give you 2 valid product keys for win7 and you reject both of them. Piss off you wankers!!!
I always found Blackberry to be the most secure as far as mobile devices go.
They were also the only devices that worked during the 9/11 attacks.
Political correctness is really just herd psychology pushed by insecure people who desperately seek social conformity.
... is that they only had 7 paying customers in Pakistan. ... Or something like that.
Nice PR move anyway - shame it's so blatantly obvious.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Ironic after BB said they'd allow the US government a back door into all the new telephone encryption.
All BB devices will just stop working in Pakistan, today? Do the owners get refunds?
At least, how else will the company stop all Service traffic in the country, other then to stop the traffic.
This actually seems worse that just complying. At least you would have a working device, and they could plaster the "send message" screen with warnings about the government reading all your messages.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
So privacy for business, but not for us plebs? http://www.bbc.com/news/techno...
'BlackBerry will not comply with that sort of directive' ...in Pakistan.
My karma ran over your dogma
...it's practically welcomed and encouraged, as demonstrated by the COO of Blackberry practically bragging about their new "lawful device interception" features a week ago.
You either shun state-sponsored surveillance or you embrace it. Make up your fucking mind already before you attempt another RIM job with the 17 customers you have left.
Isn't that one of the few regions where Blackberry still has market share?
There was this story just the other day. So they have the ability to decrypt everything, they just won't do it in bulk.
http://thenextweb.com/asia/201...
Blackberry has always caved to government demands for unrestricted access to their network in the past. The USA, Saudi Arabia and many others. That is one reason a lot of businesses dropped them as a provider. So what's different now?
It's nice of Blackberry to try and spin this as a positive that they've decided to pull the plug on Pakistan, today on November 30th. Reuters however reported on the 24th of July 2015 that the Pakistani government was moving to shut Blackberry out of the country by November 30th.
This is much more an effort on Blackberry's part to try and spin a loss of a major business customer than it is Blackberry actually takign any manner of morale stand.
How is this any different from the arrangement the Indian government required?
http://www.yro.slashdot.org/st...
"If it ain't broke, it doesn't have enough features yet"
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.
How is this a race thing? Right next door, India wanted to monitor communications b/w certain Blackberry users, as opposed to all Blackberry users, and RIM, after a 4 year standoff, agreed. Here, Pakistan wants full access to all the data, which is what Blackberry refuses. Also, in India's case, they wanted it to spy on insurgent groups, which included both Islamic and Communist groups, while in Pakistan's case, they want it to spy only on enemies of the government within Pakistan
actually, that is a good business model. evil governmental bastards want to auto-censor every byte on the web, abandon that putrid nation. it will push the people one step closer to overthrowing the rotten dictators.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
'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.'
What he really means:
BlackBerry won't comply with the Pakistani's demands because we figured it would damage our reputation way more than it's worth. Let's face it, Pakistan has no money and their government is a joke. This way we get to shout about our integrity from the mountaintops and surf on the wave of backlash against government surveillance. It also gives us a fig leaf against accusations that we might be cooperating with the alphabet soup agencies that are actually serious about spying on their citizens.
Just don't ask any impertinent questions about their relationship with the real powers that be.
> But they already do all this for the USG
I'm not sure exactly how much they do for the USG. They've mentioned their "lawful intercept" abilities, which sounds much more like "we can respond to subpoenas" and very much not "everything everyone writes gets checked and filtered and flagged".
You also make it sound like the idea of the Pakistani government having full access to communications is the same exact thing as the USG having full access to communications. These are definitely different things. It's very reasonable to proclaim that you want NO ONE to have access to your communications- that you and the people you are communicating with should have access to the data, and no one in the middle, not Blackberry, not some government, no one. It's also reasonable, though less likely to work out in reality, to proclaim that you are ok with the company having access, as long as they don't willfully share it with governments.
But even if you have that opinion, the USG and the Pakistani governments are not the same thing. Comparing the USG to the Pakistani government is frankly absurd. To claim otherwise is just anti-American drivel. That doesn't mean you have to be ok with the NSA tapping your comms- just recognize that it's a fundamentally different thing.
It's because it's Pakistan asking. They had some qualms when India first asked, but granted them access eventually.
http://thenextweb.com/asia/201...
i wish Barack would pull operations from Pakistan! Here's what he did while we were having a government "shut down" due to lack of funds: http://www.usatoday.com/story/...