One of the big news stories in the tech world this past week are the plans that the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia have to shut down the data transfer services on Blackberries in their country.
In short, it would be a Blackberry ban — after all, what good is the device if it only makes calls?
The United Arab Emirates argue that the phone does not comply with their laws, because the data coming in cannot be monitored (and thereby appropriately censored). Various news sites around the web site “security concerns”, but never seem to have a quote from an authority or industry expert to back that up, giving us pause to make the same claim here.
That said, if the authorities are experiencing difficulty in monitoring phone traffic, it could conceivably cause consternation for their security agencies.
Not alone
Back in 2007, India was contemplating a similar ban — thoughts that seem to be heating up again, now that there are others in their corner. At issue then is the central issue that is present now: the Indian government wanted a back door to the system that would allow them to monitor traffic.
The problem was that Blackberry does not have such a back door, and was not willing to create one. Research In Motion’s official statement on the matter is that such a thing does not exist and will not exist:
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.
Is this free advertising?
Research In Motion has had a tough time of it recently. Google Android has recently become the top selling smartphone platform in the United States, ousting Blackberry from the top of the list for the first time. It’s next closest rival — the iPhone — is not far behind despite severe competitive limitations (it is only available in two models, and on one network).
In the battle of Application Stores, Blackberry is a distant third, well behind the second-place Android store, which itself it light years behind Apple’s App Store for the iPhone.
And when it comes for the battle for hearts and minds, RIM’s device is even further behind — people are genuinely excited about new Android phones, or the iPhone 4. When was the last time you heard someone daydreaming about owning a Blackberry?
In the midst of all these developments, a ban in Saudia Arabia and the United Arab Emirates might look like one more blow, but looking closer, one has to wonder if that is really the case.
Why only Blackberry? Why not the iPhone, too? Why not my phone?
Why, indeed. When the concern of the authorities is that they cannot monitor incoming and outgoing data well enough to know what it is, one has little choice but to wonder how secure your data transfers truly are through other devices.
When a government says “iPhone? Go ahead, use e-mail!”, and “Blackberry? No e-mail — we cannot identify the content, so it is not allowed”, can any conclusion other than the government is reading my e-mail be reached?
This applies domestically, too, for those who are not in Saudi Arabia or the UAE. While the government might not be reading your e-mail, we cannot say the same about hackers. These bans demonstrate the relative ease of breaking into systems that we think are safeguarding our privacy.
Research in Motion should be trumpeting this “defeat” as a measure of how secure their devices truly are. While they are slumping in the consumer market, this event could be enough to maintain their huge advantage in the business market for years.
Sources
Al Jazeera
Apple Insider
The Australian
BBC News
International Business Times
The New York Times
PC Magazine
Photo credit: Newsbiscuit, The Blackberry Burqa
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