Blackberry to exit Pakistan owing to Security Reasons

Blackberry in a recent official blog post has announced that it will exit Pakistani marke as of 30 November owing to security reasons and not being able to reach a middle ground with the telecommunication authority of the country.

Earlier this year, Pakistan’s telecommunication authority has notified mobile phone operators that BlackBerry’s BES servers will not be allowed to work in the country due to security reasons.

But Blackberry claims that this notification came as a response to Blackberry’s rejection of letting the government intercept all the Enterprise Service Communication including emails and messages.

The blog post further read that,

“The truth is that 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. But BlackBerry will not comply with that sort of directive. As we have said many times, we do not support “back doors” granting open access to our customers’ information and have never done this anywhere in the world.

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. The privacy of our customers is paramount to BlackBerry, and we will not compromise that principle.

What we said in July when rumors of Pakistan’s decision started to swirl remains true today: “BlackBerry provides the world’s most secure communications platform to government, military and enterprise customers. Protecting that security is paramount to our mission. While we recognize the need to cooperate with lawful government investigative requests of criminal activity, we have never permitted wholesale access to our BES servers.”

After this official post, Government of Pakistan has extended the shutdown orders from 30th November to 30th December.