BlackBerry To Shut Down Its Operations In Pakistan After 30 December

In an official blog post yesterday, Blackberry has admitted that it will no longer operate in Pakistan. This decision has came after the demands of Pakistan government to monitor the data of blackberry servers. Blackberry has said that in July the Pakistan Telecommunications Authority (PTA) notified the country’s mobile phone operators that BlackBerry’s BES servers would no longer be allowed to operate in Pakistan starting December for security related reasons.

As the Pakistan government hasn’t provided any information about those security reasons, Blackberry has said that the government of Pakistan wanted unauthorized access to their customers data including all the BES e-mail and BES BBM message, which Blackberry refused to do and got the shutdown orders from the Pakistan security authorities.

“The truth is that the Pakistani government wanted the ability to monitor all BlackBerry Enterprise Service traffic in the country, including every BES e-mail and BES BBM message. But BlackBerry will not comply with that sort of directive. As we have said many times, we do not support “back doors” granting open access to our customers’ information and have never done this anywhere in the world.” Marty Beard, Chief Operating Officer at BlackBerry posted in the blog post. “BlackBerry provides the world’s most secure communications platform to government, military and enterprise customers. Protecting that security is paramount to our mission. While we recognize the need to cooperate with lawful government investigative requests of criminal activity, we have never permitted wholesale access to our BES servers.”

COO Marty Beard also wrote that the Government orders of shutting down Blackberry operations in Pakistan have been extended from November 30 to December 30 after the announcement from Blackberry to completely exist Pakistan on the official Blog.

At the end, he posted,”BlackBerry’s focus will remain on protecting corporate, government and military communications throughout the world, including in South Asia and the Middle East, wherever our technology operates. Although the Pakistani government’s directive was aimed only at our BES servers, we have decided to exit the market altogether, because Pakistan’s demand for open access to monitor a significant swath of our customers’ communications within its borders left us no choice but to exit the country entirely.”