Reports have it that local phone operators have been told that they will have to cease and desist the operation of BlackBerry services in Pakistan.
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ZDNet reports that it saw a memo from the Pakistan Telecommunications Authority to Pakistani mobile networks Mobilink, Ufone and Telenor Pakistan.
Pakistan has banned BlackBerry’s enterprise server and its internet and messaging services “for security reasons” in a crackdown on privacy.
PTA on Sunday said that all the Black Berry services, including Enterprise Services (BES) would continue in Pakistan, if the cellular companies provide law enforcing agencies access to its BES services. If the company does not agree to work with the authorities by providing them access to BES, then it will lose what is a key market for it, as there are about 4,000 to 5,000 BlackBerry users there.
The Privacy global report said the ISI had few legal checks on their surveillance. The proposed end of BES in the Middle Eastern country is scheduled for December, but it’s already raising many eyebrows worldwide over it’s real objective. It’s well known that Pakistan faces numerous security threats, not least from Taliban-linked militants operating in the country’s largely lawless northern areas.
In a blog post, the privacy watchdog said the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency was moving to “tap all internet protocol (IP)-bound communications traffic entering or travelling through Pakistan and corresponding monitoring capacities”.
The list of specific programmes under which there was cooperation between the ISI on the one hand and the NSA and the U.K.’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) on the other is a long on, according to the report, and includes some such as Fairview and SKYNET.
The report pointed out that Pakistan is a highly networked country, with over 70 percent of the population using mobile phones and about 11 percent using the Internet, generating huge amounts of communications traffic for the country’s intelligence to monitor.
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Rights groups also expressed concern over a provision that allows the government to share intelligence with foreign spy agencies, such as the American National Security Agency, and the mandating of service providers to retain telephone and email records for up to a year. India, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Indonesia have all disrupted communications over its network because of fears that the encryption could be used to hide illegal activities. “Protecting that security is paramount to our mission”.
