BlackBerry lovers have had to face a lot of disappointment lately. Recently, BlackBerry made news by getting into trouble in countries like India, UAE and Saudi Arabia. In fact, UAE and Saudi Arabia have already banned e-mail, web browsing and the messaging features of this smart phone. India is also considering a ban on services because of issues pertaining to security. Why security problems? In order to understand this, we must first know the working of a BlackBerry.
Blackberry Data encryption
Now, all issues arise due to the manner in which information exchange takes place. Unlike all the other phones which operate on open standards, BlackBerry uses an extremely highly secured and proprietary encoding mechanism due to which every piece of data which leaves the smart phone can only be decrypted by the data network center of BlackBerry in Canada, meaning the communications are highly secure and no one actually understands the message travelling through the wireless network and internet of the BlackBerry. These services are used by various military and government agencies for communication.
The governments of all countries have no means of intercepting communication and naturally, this is a threat to national security because of increased activities of terrorism. Terrorists and other anti-national elements can happily communicate with nobody to intercept the communication. A dangerous issue indeed!
The Bottomline
Every country is asking cooperation from BlackBerry’s side to make the situation better by permitting tapping of data. If BlackBerry doesn’t accede to the requests of the governments of the concerned countries, it would have to face the consequences.
In its defense though, Blackberry has said that it can’t provide help in this issue, because the encoding algorithm is of very high security. Even if it wanted to, BlackBerry couldn’t hack its system. This is not the answer to every country’s question.
