Pakistan to shut down BlackBerry services

In the name of ensuring security, Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) has directed all cellular mobile operators to close down Blackberry Enterprise Services (BES) till November 30, 2015.

He requested not to be named due to the sensitivity of discussing communications and intelligence.

Earlier this week, the Pakistani advocacy group Bytesforall published a document it said was leaked from the PTA, signed by director of licensing Amjad Mustafa Malik.

These so-called “security reasons” do not mean BlackBerry Enterprise Services are not secure enough for Pakistan. A legal notice sent to all internet providers (ISPs) by the Pakistan Telecommunications Authority ordered the ISPs to inform authorities if any of their customers are using virtual private networks (VPNs) to browse the web.

This strong encryption prevents law enforcement and intelligence agencies from intercepting messages and snooping on user activity.

The question now is whether BlackBerry will comply with the order or if it will shut down BES in the country by November. 30. “There was a challenge that the Blackberry email service could not be tracked or decoded, which leads to the security reasons”, he explained.

“This [move] suggests that BlackBerry wasn’t willing to capitulate to those requests for access”, Christopher Parsons, a researcher with the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab digital security organization. The project is the first Pakistani government-run centralised mass surveillance project to be publicly revealed, the report released by the UK-based charity that defends and promotes the right to privacy across the world, said. The country’s premier spy agency, the Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) recently told the Supreme Court that it was tapping over 6,000 phones as recent as May 2015.

The Canadian smartphone maker’s secure messaging service has faced disruption in India, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates, and Indonesia, after their governments expressed concern that criminals and terrorists were using the service. Since the creation of the Pakistan Internet Exchange – an communications system that keeps most of Pakistan’s communications within Pakistan – the government has been able to route the majority of Pakistan’s internet traffic through a single core backbone with limited gateways, making it much easier to monitor internet traffic, the report said.