The war on Blackberry

The decision by the United Arab Emirates to suspend Blackberry services within their respective jurisdictions is nothing short of authoritarian paranoia. The country has not had any recent outburst of Blackberry-enabled crime. One suspects, that this is simply a case of repressive bureaucrats finally figuring out that information sent via Blackberries was not within their gnarly, Orwellian grip. This newspaper supports freedom of information and feels that the Emirati government has not produced sufficient justification for either the suspension of Blackberry services or it's need to monitor the data sent via the company’s networks. For its part, Research in Motion, the Canadian company that owns and operates the Blackberry service, has been admirable in its refusal to back down over the demands by governments in several countries to allow them to monitor its clients’ data

The UAE government seems to have kicked off a trend. First Saudi Arabia, then India and now Indonesia seem to have jumped into the fray, all apparently having read the same article in The Economist that explains exactly how Blackberry’s services are beyond the reach of their monitoring efforts. We as Pakistanis are reminded of the authoritarian leanings of our own government. All internet traffic in Pakistan is routed through centralised servers in Islamabad, which slows down access. The Lahore High Court saw fit to order the PTA to effectively monitor the entire internet for blasphemous content and block it, slowing down internet traffic even further. Let us hope that the government of Pakistan does not join the international bandwagon of technologically illiterate bureaucrats who feel that the deluge of information that our age produces can somehow be channelled and controlled.

Published in The Express Tribune, August 9^th, 2010.