BlackBerry Staying In Pakistan After Government Caves

You might recall that late last year the decision was made by BlackBerry to pull their operations from Pakistan after the government wanted to monitor e-mail, BES and BBM traffic. Just before the new year the Pakistani government backed down and as a result BlackBerry isn’t going anywhere. Here’s what a blog post from BlackBerry had to say:

After productive discussions, the Government of Pakistan has rescinded its shutdown order, and BlackBerry has decided to remain in the Pakistan market.

We are grateful to the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority and the Pakistani government for accepting BlackBerry’s position that we cannot provide the content of our customers’ BES traffic, nor will we provide access to our BES servers.

We look forward to serving the Pakistani market for years to come, including introducing new products and services, and thank our valued customers in Pakistan for their patience and loyalty.

Seeing as there’s a huge discussion going on right now about whether governments should have access to data on smartphones, this will surely get the attention of governments like the US who see this level of access to be a requirement. Thus I believe it is safe to say that this story is far from over.

 

Leave a Reply

Discover more from The IT Nerd

Subscribe now to keep reading and get access to the full archive.

Continue reading