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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!!!
... 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.
...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.
http://thenextweb.com/asia/201...
"As opposed to what?"
As opposed to other cellphones.
"It sure as heck did go down for awhile on 9/11."
Blackberry was the only communications lifeline for many on 9/11. It was reported in the NYT.
It has even been suggested that radio jamming technology may have been employed on 9/11, as several important communication systems 'just happened' to go down that day:
- New York cell phones (although this could possibly be caused by a system overload)
- WTC’s internal communication system (just happened to be down that day)
- Port Authority's transmission repeater on top of WTC5 (just happened to be down that day)
Regardless of these communications failures, Blackberry still allowed people to communicate on 9/11.
Then we moved into the age of surveillance, and the world of the Spyphone - largely justified by those attacks. How ironic.
Political correctness is really just herd psychology pushed by insecure people who desperately seek social conformity.
That had nothing to do with security.
It was simply that Blackberry was using BBM and people were sending data-based text messages to each other.
Everyone else was using classic flip-phones and trying to call each other, and the cell networks were overloaded.
Getting a few bytes of text that would auto-retry in the background was reliable. Getting an open voice slot on a cell tower was not.
Grammer Nazis - I mod you "troll" unless you actually add something on-topic. Yes, I know I have mispellings in my sig.
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.
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.
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...