Saudi, UAE to ban BlackBerry services

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Of all the things one could have cut off in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, BlackBerry service has become the latest painful addition to the list, with the United Arab Emirates scrambling to follow suit and chop BlackBerry messenger services by October.
The news emerged after the UAE’s Communications and Information Technology Commission ordered local telcos to simply ban BlackBerry instant messaging, email and Internet-browsing by October 11 because RIM has not relented to allowing the government monitoring access to the data. Data sent to and from Blackberry devices is encrypted and sent via offshore servers, making it untraceable locally.
“Certain BlackBerry services allow users to act without any legal accountability, causing judicial, social and national security concerns,” the United Arab Emirates’ Telecommunications Regulatory Authority (TRA) said in a statement.
Last week RCR reported similar concerns from India, which has taken a hard line after terrorist attacks in Mumbai last year. In Saudi Arabia and the UAE, however, the reasons for the ban appear to have more to do with censorship and spying on the local populace than protecting against terrorists, although government officials have been quick to deny it.
“Censorship has got nothing to do with this,” Mohammed Al Ghanem, director general of the UAE’s TRA, told Reuters on Sunday. Of course, Mr. Al Ghanem made no mention of an incident last year when state-controlled service provider, Emirates Telecommunications pushed out a “software upgrade,” which RIM subsequently warned was an unauthorized “telecommunications surveillance application.”

According to varying estimates Saudi Arabia has around 700,000 BlackBerry subscribers while the UAE – including financial and business hub, Dubai – has 500,000. Cutting off service will deal a crippling blow to enterprise in both countries, although the ratio of BlackBerry business to consumer users in Saudi is thought to be 20 to 80, with young people known to use the device’s services to flirt – something the government would very much like to crack down on.
Several Middle Eastern mobile pundits have posited that the threat of bans may pressure RIM into caving and providing some sort of monitoring mechanism to the governments of both countries, but others say the firm has over 41 million BlackBerry subscribers worldwide, and a few hundred thousand in the Gulf is but a 3% drop in the ocean.
Of course, while Saudi and the UAE may be of little consequence to RIM, India potentially followed by China could be a lot more serious.
The game of chicken, however, works both ways and the UAE, which has made attracting businesses and enterprise to its shores a top priority, may find this latest move simply too unpalatable to companies mulling a move to the region.
On Monday, RIM put out a statement regarding the proposed bans, which reads:
“Due to recent media reports, Research In Motion (RIM) recognizes that some customers are curious about the discussions that occur between RIM and certain governments regarding the use of encryption in BlackBerry products. RIM also understands that the confidential nature of these discussions has consequently given rise to speculation and misinterpretation. RIM respects both the regulatory requirements of government and the security and privacy needs of corporations and consumers. While RIM does not disclose confidential regulatory discussions that take place with any government, RIM assures its customers that it is committed to continue delivering highly secure and innovative products that satisfy the needs of both customers and governments.”
It goes on to say, “Many public facts about the BlackBerry Enterprise Server security architecture have been well established over the years and remain unchanged.”
The Canadian company also argues that “governments have a wide range of resources and methodologies to satisfy national security and law enforcement needs without compromising commercial security requirements,” and that the use of strong encryption in wireless technology “is not unique to the BlackBerry platform.”
Indeed, strong encryption is a mandatory requirement for all enterprise-class wireless email services.
Even if it wanted to, which it clearly doesn’t, RIM says the BlackBerry security architecture for enterprise customers “is based on a symmetric key system whereby the customer creates their own key and only the customer ever possesses a copy of their encryption key. RIM does not possess a “master key”, nor does any “back door” exist in the system that would allow RIM or any third party to gain unauthorized access to the key or corporate data.”
In short, says RIM, it will not be doing anything to compromise “the integrity and security of the BlackBerry Enterprise Solution.”