UAE: BlackBerry Ban
August 2nd, 2010 by Jennifer
The UAE announced yesterday that it would suspend BlackBerry email and text messaging services starting in October, with statements from the Telecommunications Regulatory Authority arguing that “‘certain BlackBerry services allow users to act without any legal accountability, causing judicial, social and national security concerns for the U.A.E.’.” The decision has sparked concerns that other Gulf nations– including Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Bahrain –may follow up with their own bans. Saudi Telecom officials gave conflicting reports regarding whether Saudi Arabia had already decided to follow the UAE’s example, while the government did not release any official statement on the issue, and one adviser offered anonymous statements to the effect that no official determination had been made. Regimes in the region have indicated their concern over BlackBerry services, which use highly encrypted data to transfer messages on a closed internal system rather than over the open Internet, rendering surveillance of communications difficult. According to Barry Meier and Robert F. Worth writing in the New York Times, “The monitoring of information is a particularly thorny issue for autocratic regimes in the Persian Gulf worried that the Internet might be used for antigovernment purposes — a concern heightened by the passionate online response in Iran to the 2009 presidential election that helped energize the opposition and led to weeks of unrest.”
Posted in Freedom, Gulf, Saudi Arabia, Technology, UAE |
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