The Nokia Pushmail conspiracy: Big brother wakes up once again

How will the Pakistan govt react to Swedish phone giant’s powermail service.

How much do you want to bet that the Pakistan government will have the same problem that India’s government has with Nokia’s new proposed pushmail service?

Although, the service has only been proposed in India at this point, it is very likely that it will be rolled out in Pakistan as well.

And it is even more probable that the government will want to be able to see the correspondence.

According to the Financial Times, India’s government is having issues with the service in India and wants telecom service providers to bar Nokia’s power mail service till they put in a legal monitoring system in place. Supposedly, the government ordered its telecommunications arm to do this because of a report from the Indian Intelligence Bureau.

The pushmail/powermail messaging service that Nokia may be planning to provide would involve push email for companies and consumers and enables mobile users with compatible Nokia cellphones to manage multiple email accounts from widely used email services like Yahoo!, Gmail, Rediff to Sify.

This incident in India is significant, mainly because the last time our neighbours had a similar incident with blackberry, it foreshadowed one in Pakistan as well. India tried to impose a ban on Blackberry and very soon after, our government tried to do the same.

Pakistan’s telecom watchdog sent out notices to companies to disable Blackberry services. Even now, Blackberry internet is banned and companies give their users edge service through alternative means.

However, it is rumoured that the telecoms and/or the embassies got together and forced the government into letting them keep their precious Blackberries. Word on the grapevine suggest that the government allowed the services to be resumed, but have had the telecom implement killswitches for emergencies; the sources for this are very shaky so this needs to be taken with a pinch of salt. However, logically, it seems like the only workable solution. At least this way the government can have them turned off in cases of an emergency.

Now, it is expected that Nokia will face similar issues with the Pakistani government if it launches the service in the country; as it will probably ask them to give it some way to monitor the correspondence. And with around 70 per cent of the market share securely under its flag, this could finally give the government complete access to the people’s emails.

Because Blackberries, though widely used, make up a slight fraction of the people and just monitoring them would probably leave significant gaps in the monitoring structure of the government.

Let’s see how Nokia deals with the Pakistani government. Hopefully, they will find some way to protect our information from prying eyes.

Published in The Express Tribune, April 18^th,  2011.