BlackBerry Will Continue Operations In Pakistan (fortune.com)

An anonymous reader writes: At the end of November, BlackBerry announced it would pull its operations out of Pakistan after the country's government demanded access to BlackBerry's user data. The Pakistan government has now dropped that request, and BlackBerry will continue operating there as a result. In a statement, BlackBerry COO Marty Beard said, "We are grateful to the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority and the Pakistani government for accepting BlackBerry's position that we cannot provide the content of our customers' BES traffic, nor will we provide access to our BES servers."

Comments

Interesting

[93 Escort Wagon]

So they won't give to Pakistan what they gave to India, eh? It'd be curious to see where they decided to draw that line, in terms of dollars earned per country.

Re:Interesting

[Dahamma]

Very old article, not even true, and refuted by Blackberry.

http://in.reuters.com/article/...

"RIM is providing an appropriate lawful access solution that enables India's telecom operators to be legally compliant with respect to their BlackBerry consumer traffic, to the same degree as other smartphone providers in India, but this does not extend to secure BlackBerry enterprise communications"

Re:Interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

In the interest of accuracy ...

Your link is 5 years old. A more recent link (2013) indicates that Blackberry have allowed access to BBM and BIS, but NOT BES enterprise.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/07/11/blackberry_gives_indian_spooks_access/

In short, India and Pakistan have been given exactly the same deal.

Re: Interesting

[tlhIngan]

They can't give physical access to the clients' BES servers but that doesn't mean they haven't given them a key to unlock intercepted encrypted traffic. If they are okay with giving access to their less paying patrons, why draw the line there?

You have to realize how BlackBerries work.

First, when they're attached to a BES server, the BES server and Blackberry exchange keys. That key is used for all traffic - the BlackBerry itself encrypts traffic using the BES server key, forwards it to the Blackberry network which sends it to the customer's BES installation. BES then decrypts the package and figures out what it needs to do - work email, traffic destined for the internet, etc. All communications are end-to-end encrypted and the Blackberry network just sees data blobs it can't decrypt.

In a consumer mode, what happens is the Blackberry network exchanges keys with the blackberry. The blackberry sends encrypted payloads to the blackberry network, which then decrypts it and accesses the internet. At this point the traffic is decrypted.

A "local" blackberry network server like that in India just means the Indian users are routed to that server. If the blackberry is attached to BES, then the indian server forwards it onwards as an encrypted payload as that's all it can do. If it isn't, then it's handled locally and decrypted.

A blackberry without BES has decrypted network traffic like a regular smartphone - if you're accessing an IMAP server unencrypted, the blackberry will access it unencrypted.

Pakistan wanted ALL blackberry traffic to be available to it - including BES traffic (India just wanted unattached traffic). That is not in the architecture, which is why Blackberry was shutting down - the design of the network was such that BES traffic could not be decrypted because it was end-to-end. Unattached blackberries are also end-to-end encrypted, except one end is the server attached to the public internet.

Re:Blackberrys BES is one of their few selling poi

[RandomFactor]

Doesn't matter. People compared the heavily limited locked down enterprise blackberry devices with their personal unrestricted iDroids. What a shock, iDroids won by a mile, even while Blackberry was still ahead of them..

Security? Management? Not part of the end user world view.

Re: Who? Just kidding.

[guruevi]

Their selling point was always encryption but then they sold out their customers to the US government and later other governments as well and all trust in their platform was lost. That and the fact that their functionality is easily replicated by going full SSL and remotely revoked full device encryption (which the iPhone did early on).