The banning of the BlackBerry service by the United Arab Emirates government will test RIM's commitment to maintaining a global email service. It would be better for RIM to withdraw from countries that do not see the value of its globally secure service offering, said an Ovum analyst.
Steve Hodgkinson, Research Director for Ovum, said the UAE Telecommunications Regulatory Authority (TRA) issued a self-titled "important announcement" on Aug 2 stating its intention to suspend BlackBerry messenger, email and web-browsing services from Oct 11.
This was the latest development in an apparently long-running discussion between the UAE government and the Canadian company that operates the BlackBerry service.
The TRA adopted this position because RIM's secure telecommunications service prevented the UAE government from monitoring messages and emails, and restricting access to forbidden web content.
The Saudi Arabian Communications and Information Technology Commission (CITC) followed suit within a few days, announcing a ban on BlackBerry's service, which came into effect on Aug 5. This follows similar discussions between RIM and the governments of China and India earlier in the year.
The announcements have provoked a storm of debate. That all countries conduct surveillance on their citizens is not disputed. The difference is the degree to which the people can hold the government to account for abuse of its powers of surveillance. Countries vary considerably in the manner in which the balance between citizens' interests and state interests is defined, with dictatorships on the one extreme and liberal democracy on the other.
However, the rise of the Internet and global wireless communications is challenging each country with its own scenario, introducing notions of global freedom that appear to transcend the sovereignty of governments to regulate their citizens.
Platforms like BlackBerry deploy highly secure ICT services directly into the hands of individual citizens at a low cost. Wireless services transcend borders, secure messaging subverts telecommunications interceptions, data is hosted outside the reach of government agencies and unfiltered web content can be accessed freely.
RIM can now freeze governments out of the regulatory loop by enabling citizens to have secret conversations that are taken for granted as essential by any corporation or business, and indeed by government agencies themselves as users of BlackBerries.
This situation will be a challenging one for RIM to resolve. Developing nations are a large and growing market that it cannot afford to alienate. On the other hand, RIM's security policy is unambiguous: "The BlackBerry security architecture for enterprise customers is purposefully designed to exclude the capability for RIM or any third party to read encrypted information under any circumstances." The strength of RIM's security is a core part of its unique selling proposition.
While the security architecture is tighter for enterprise customers, there will be a "guilt by association" impact for RIM if it is too accommodating of the demands of countries such as Saudi Arabia and the UAE - or if it is seen to be flexible on security when governments threaten to close market access.
The government agencies are themselves large users of the BlackBerry platform. Agencies were initially wary of the security risks of RIM's hosted email service, but are now comfortable with the security of the platform.
In my opinion , BlackBerry messenger feature in BlackBerry mobile phone make everything looks secure and private in this section. However in some territory is too much private,sometime it make serious problem with government about "national security".If this feature are in terrorist and sending plan to member,that is government can't standing. This situation RIM and UAE must talking about nation security and private section.
AWL 01 analysis
Text wordcount = 64
Frequency of list words detected = 2
Rounded Coverage = 3%
Oxford 3000 analysis
Text wordcount = 64
Frequency of list words detected = 49
Rounded Coverage = 77%
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