BlackBerry will bid goodbye to Pakistan

Islamabad, Dec 1: With Pakistan stating that BlackBerry is a security concern, the smartphone and secure communications company is all set out to pull its services out of Pakistan. Citing intrusions into privacy of users, BlackBerry will officially exit Pakistan on Dec 30th.

The decision to pull out comes after the Pakistan government had banned the Enterprise servers citing security reasons.

A statement by BlackBerry's chief operating officer Marty Beard read, "The truth is that the Pakistani government wanted the ability to monitor all BlackBerry Enterprise Service traffic in the country, including every email and BBM message. But BlackBerry will not comply with that sort of directive. We do not support ‘back doors' granting open access to our customers' information and have never done this anywhere in the world."

Pakistan on the other hand had cited security reasons and said that BlackBerry servers could not be intercepted by the Pakistan agencies.

BlackBerry, however, stated that it would respond to lawful government investigative requests of criminal activity.
 BlackBerry had faced similar problems in India and the United Arab Emirates as well.

However, with tighter restrictions being put in place, bans were lifted in some places. However, in the case of Pakistan, the problem was extensive surveillance which was being seen as an abuse of communications surveillance powers, including widespread internet-monitoring and censorship.

OneIndia News