Saudi Arabia’s ban of BlackBerry Messenger takes effect

11th August, 2010 by adina
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The planned ban of the BlackBerry Messenger services in Saudi Arabia is active and access to Research in Motion’s instant chats has been shut off. This block came as a consequence of officials not being able to monitor BBM conversations. The enforcement of this restriction means that any carrier disobeying would be fined an equivalent of $1.3 million.

Web and e-mail access would not be blocked, unlike the UAE ban. There is no explanation of the reasons the Saudi government had to take this measure, but with a number of over 700,000 BlackBerry owners, officials hope to avoid discontentment of business people as well as other users that depend on Research in Motion’s phones.

There are suspicions about the government concerns regarding BBM used for relationships while this society is a very traditional one. Since messages are encrypted, it is possible that couples can talk in private while social taboos strongly prevent this in public.

Discussions and plans of BlackBerry bans involve Lebanon and Algeria too, in part or completely. It is known that much of the service provided by RIM is encrypted and also implemented in a special way that cannot be cracked even by the company itself. There are end-to-end locks on communications which allow getting the description keys only by the sender and the recipient. This way, although RIM may be able to point to a message, it can neither implicitly decipher the message nor identify the users and phones involved in the conversation.


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