On Thu, Aug 5, 2010 at 1:51 PM, Philip Musyoki
<pmusyoki@gmail.com> wrote:
As you may have heard, some countries (UEA and Saudi Arabia) will disable internet, email, internet messaging on Blackberries because RIM in motion has failed to provide the authorities there with access customer data for the purposes of national security. India has also been talking to RIM about the same. Now other regimes, like Indonesia are considering their own requests for the same. This will also apply to citizens of other nations visiting these countries. Now if you were planning to go to Dubai with your Blackberry, you should start thinking of making other internet arrangements or carrying enough Dhirams for use at the local cybers.
Do I see a trend here? I think it is just a matter of time and all sorts of phones will be covered, and soon all regimes will be 'requesting' data for national security. Where does this leave us in KE? I can only imagine major players will be too happy to handover those email, websites and SMSs accessed through their systems. is the RIM setting a bad precedence?
You appear not to have read the whole story about the issues in contention. IIRC, data sent through blackberry is encrypted within the device, goes through RIM's own servers and only gets decrypted when it reaches the destination device. RIM uses proprietary encryption of this data and as such, only them can decrypt it. For govt security agencies to access this data (in the holy name of state security) RIM needs to "work with them" to give them access to the data but that means RIM will have to change their encryption mechanisms in order to allow these big brothers to watch what BBians are doing.
All the other phones are not subject to this! As it stands Queen Bee (as someone calls it here), Zain (or whatever it's called now) and the like can give access to all your communication to state security agents who wouldn't have to put in any much efforts as they would on RIMs servers.
You know why Obama uses Blackberry? :-)