The Pakistani government plans to shut down BlackBerry Ltd.’s encrypted enterprise communication services by Dec. 1 for “security reasons”, the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority said on Friday.
Pakistan, a nuclear-armed nation of 180 million people, is plagued by militancy, criminal gangs and drug traffickers.
”PTA has issued directions to local mobile phone operators to close BlackBerry Enterprise Services from Nov. 30 on security reasons,” an official with the Pakistan Telecommunications Authority said in a text message.
He asked 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.
The memo cited “serious concerns by the Security Agency” (the precise agency is not named) in demanding that mobile operators Mobilink, Ufone and Telenor Pakistan shut down access to BlackBerry Enterprise Server [BES] by November 30, 2015.
BlackBerry was not immediately available to comment.
A report released this week by British-based watchdog Privacy International said Pakistan’s powerful military intelligence agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), was seeking to dramatically expand its ability to intercept communications.
There are several jurisdictions with surveillance laws that can intercept messages sent over public telecom networks. Messages sent by a regular consumer’s BlackBerry have a lower level of security than those sent by a devices that communicates over the company’s BES network, a separate service that many governments and corporations pay for.
BlackBerry’s BES encrypts data such as emails and its BlackBerry Messenger messages sent between a user’s phone and public networks, ensuring greater privacy for users but making life harder for police and intelligence agencies.
If a government ordered BlackBerry to hand over messages sent via its BES network, the company couldn’t comply because there is no backdoor into those coded messages.
That technical inability for BlackBerry to bow to pressure could explain why Pakistan would ban the service outright.
“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.
The company has faced similar problems in the past in India, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Indonesia.
The Privacy International report said the ISI had few legal checks on their surveillance.
”Pakistan’s intelligence agencies have abused their communications surveillance powers, including by spying on opposition politicians and Supreme Court judges. Widespread Internet monitoring and censorship has also been used to target journalists, lawyers and activists,” the report said.
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