Blackberry to 'exit' Pakistan over data-retention row | Hacker News Reader

Blackberry to 'exit' Pakistan over data-retention row

bbc.co.uk

40 pointsjackgavigan15 comments

The Pakistanis just played this stupidly. The article says "The Pakistani government wanted to be able to monitor every message and email sent via its phones, it said." That's ridiculous, of course no firm would agree.

What you have to do instead is to say you want to have access to records that may help against terror, everything approved by a court of course. Then create a court, make it process as many requests as you want. You appoint the court so it will rubber-stamp whatever you want (you must let 1% requests fail for plausible deniability). Make Blackberry complicit enough that they have no face-saving if they make it public. Viola! You have a spy system going.

That sounds like it would work in a fake democracy like the U.S.. I bet it would barely get any media coverage unless half a dozen people on the inside gave gory details. Even then, it would probably mostly fizzle out with people watching stuff on Netflix while their government watches them.

You could call such a court something official-sounding, like FISA

This is a country that executes terrorists already in custody in staged police encounters despite having both a military and a civilian special antiterrorist court system. I don't think they're much for due process.

Mr Beard said Blackberry did not support "backdoors" that would grant open access to customers' information and had never complied with such a request anywhere in the world.

I'm kind of confused by this. I mean we're talking about the company RIM that already handed over the keys to India, right?

http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2012-08-02/news...

Perhaps in India, the solution was more targeted than what was being sought in Pakistan.

The interesting thing about all this is that it raises the question of how companies like Blackberry will react if the UK's Investigatory Powers Bill is passed in its current form.

They don't even have the keys to turn over for BES (unless there are backdoors)

This article refers to BIS... the consumer servers. Once the server is on foreign soil, its governed by local law.

That's the way the world works.

Which is one of the reasons BlackBerry would rather leave the country than piss off its customers by telling them they can't use their own keys anymore.

They're more than happy to give up the one and only consumer BBM key, as they've already done for India and Saudi Arabia, and possibly other countries as well that we don't know about.

As the company's COO said a couple of weeks ago, BlackBerry supports "lawful intercept" for their products and services:

http://fedscoop.com/blackberry-taking-balanced-approach-to-e...

And by the way, the article is inaccurate/outdated. BlackBerry already said it will delay the exit (probably indefinitely) as the Pakistan government has already extended its BES shutdown by another month, and probably also indefinitely, as I don't think it wanted BlackBerry to actually leave the country, but it hoped it could scare it into giving it access.

This also tells us companies (including BlackBerry in other countries) shouldn't be so quick to "pee in their pants" (as another famous executive quote once said, even though I know he meant something different) as soon as governments start threatening them with a shutdown unless they provide backdoors or stop using strong encryption. Instead, they should do the right thing and always fight for their customers (including regular consumers, not just enterprise customers), even if that means using the final option of leaving the country (but it often won't be the case).

The entire Indian subcontinent is currently struggling with the transition to a state of the world where citizens communicate freely and frequently without going through an organization controlled directly by the government.

Bangladesh, for example, has banned Facebook, Whatsapp, Viber and a bunch of other services for the last two weeks in order to prevent extremist responses to a couple of very touchy executions. The telecommunications ministry has reached out to "the Facebook authorities" and the US State Department in order to "make a deal"...but the way they've gone about doing so feeds into the narrative that the they have no idea what they are doing.

They'll learn to be effectively evil in time, I guess.

Very true, we just launched an open source mobile app to help users manage digital and physical security (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.secfirst.u...) and from the little that we know (Google Play Store unfortunately keeps data on countries of download) India seems to be one of the places where we are seeing most new users. I guess it makes sense with the nature of the current government and also the crack down on media and NGOs.

But really, what is this saying about the companies that are allowed to remain? Does the Pakistani government have the ability to monitor every message/email sent via phones through a domestic carrier? (I suppose all carriers are domestic.)

As a business decision, is this really smart for Blackberry? There is a decent market in Pakistan, after all.

Maybe, but you have to consider that meeting the conditions to enter this market could seriously damage your value proposition in every other market you serve—or want to serve.

That's the opposite of a "decent" market.

There are other carriers in the country, not all of which are domestic. They have all provided 'lawful' interception capabilities for several years now [1]. The government is currently pushing for a new cyber-crime bill that will give it even more surveillance powers [2].

[1] https://www.privacyinternational.org/sites/default/files/PAK... page 13 of pdf file. [2] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/11/deeper-look-inside-pec...

Two things about this:

1. What does that say about the companies that are allowed to remain?

2. What are the parallels to this and what the US does to its technology companies? I've never heard of a company being "kicked out" of the US for failing to comply with its laws, they're simply penalized.

Alternatively, someone may be knocking out the competition to support a home grown solution.

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