​Deal in the works? BlackBerry delays Pakistan retreat by one month

Hours after BlackBerry announced it would leave Pakistan immediately due to unacceptable surveillance demands, the company said it will stay for at least one more month.

The Pakistani government’s request to have a backdoor on all communications on BlackBerry Enterprise Service (BES) would see its withdrawal from the nation on November 30, the Canadian company announced on Monday. However, BlackBerry has now said it will defer that action until December 30.

“The Government of Pakistan has notified BlackBerry that it has extended its shutdown order from November 30 to December 30. BlackBerry will delay its exit from the Pakistan market until then,” wrote BlackBerry’s chief operating officer, Marty Beard, on BlackBerry’s official blog late on Monday.

BlackBerry BES, including BES email and BBM messages, was to be blacklisted on Pakistani mobile networks by the beginning of December under an order issued by the Pakistan Telecommunications Authority in July.

Pakistani online rights group Bytesforall in July published a leaked official document revealing the government had ordered three Pakistini mobile networks to shut BES connections down by 30 November “without fail” due to “serious concerns”. There were no other reasons given for shutdown in the document.

The assumption might be that the Pakistani government ordered the shutdown for national security reasons, however BlackBerry’s Beard (prior to the one month extension) said that was not the case.

“Pakistan’s demand was not a question of public safety; we are more than happy to assist law enforcement agencies in investigations of criminal activity. Rather, Pakistan was essentially demanding unfettered access to all of our BES customers’ information,” he said.

A distinction needs to be drawn between BES — solely for enterprise customers — and BlackBerry’s services for consumers.

BlackBerry in 2010 faced a similar block in India over the government’s wish to access BES messages and email. Blackberry in 2011 gave carriers the ability to intercept the content of messages on its consumer services, including consumer BBM and Blackberry Internet Service, but held that access to messages on its corporate BES was infeasible due to it’s encryption set-up. BlackBerry and the Indian government appeared to have negotiated a truce in 2013, in which the government could access BES user names but not the content of messages.

Read more: National cybersecurity capability needs decades of “fresh thinking” on skills, private-sector partnerships: ACCS

The issues BlackBerry faced in India and the Middle East back then in many ways mirrors the current debate in the US over whether Apple and Google should be required by law to offer so-called master keys to the government that would enable it to bypass encryption.

According to Beard, 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” and insisted that Blackberry has “never done this anywhere in the world.”

BlackBerry’s handset business hangs in the balance amid its latest move for survival, the Android-powered Priv, a privacy-focussed device. However, it’s also squeezing everything it can from its legacy as a secure communications platform provider in an enterprise market where it’s hardware has been sidelined by Apple or Google Android devices.

Needless to say, BlackBerry does not want to be seen to be giving up too easy on this front, though it's compromised before and may still need to rework its parting words.

Read more: ​Adobe tells web developers to quit Flash, hacker's favourite target

“Although the Pakistani government’s directive was aimed only at our BES servers, we have decided to exit the market altogether,” Beard said prior to Pakistan’s one month extension.

“Pakistan’s demand for open access to monitor a significant swath of our customers’ communications within its borders left us no choice but to exit the country entirely.”


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Tags Blackberrypakistanlaw enforcementCSO Australiaunacceptable surveillance demandsPakistani governmentBlackBerry Enterprise Service (BES)

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