As a result of civil unrest in Egypt, BlackBerry service provided by the three main carriers there, Mobinil, Vodafone, and Etisalat, has been shut down, according to a flood of tweets from the area. Twitter and Facebook access has already been restricted in order to clamp down on the organization of further protests.
BlackBerry’s blockage is significant because it could have presented a secure channel separate from standard smartphone data that might have been able to get to outside servers. The encryption that BlackBerry Internet Service traffic goes through has even been considered too tight by some countries, like the U.A.E., India, and Saudi Arabia, whose governments required a degree of lawful interception. Now that things are getting heated in Egypt, which is a highly conservative country on a good day, it’s no surprise to see BIS shut down. I suspect that if or when service is restored, there will be similar surveillance measures in place to those RIM has implemented elsewhere in the world.
As much as I like the idea of BlackBerry enabling freedom fighters in the world, RIM operates solely and completely at the discretion of local governments, and if for whatever reason those govenments don’t want their people communicating freely, there’s only so much RIM can do about it.
[via BerryReview]