A chink in RIM’s armor

The UAE and Saudi Arabia, in remarkably short time, convinced RIM to set up data centers and allow surveillance of BlackBerry Messaging in their nations. India and the United States have been asking for surveillance options for years, but Saudi Arabia convinced them to set it up within the span of a week. The UAE has a deadline of October 11, that it seems likely, RIM will meet.

RIM has built a reputation of having a very secure network, which is unique for the mobile messaging industry. Messages on the BlackBerry network are encrypted, so even intercepting wireless signals can fail to be effective. RIM’s data centers are in Canada and, to the best of my knowledge, even the Canadian and United States governments don’t have easy access to messages in RIM’s servers. How did the UAE and Saudi Arabia convince RIM, so quickly, to give them access to messaging data within their nations?

With a relatively small security force, the UAE relies heavily on electronic eavesdropping to monitor for any potentially subversive activities. The Gulf nation has been particularly on edge after a Hamas leader was assassinated in Dubai earlier this year” – Tom Peter, Christian Science Monitor

Since that assassination, the UAE has put pressure on RIM to open up message data for snooping. Supposedly, BlackBerry messaging was involved in the assassination – but even if it wasn’t, BlackBerry messaging remains conspicuously absent from the UAE’s surveillance program, and that’s making the nation’s government nervous.

But RIM has, until now, remained consistent and resilient: they do not give surveillance abilities to one government and not others. Even if they did, they don’t possess the keys used for encrypting corporate networks. This is reassuring for businesspeople, government officials, and maybe even terrorists who travel internationally and send confidential information over the BlackBerry network.

Until Saudi Arabia called RIM’s bluff and shut off the BlackBerry network for two hours. RIM quickly conceded and agreed to set up a data center in Saudi Arabia that the government could snoop on. Now RIM has lost their higher ground and they’ll have to concede to other nations’ demands: UAE wants their own data center to snoop on, India does too, Kuwait wants pornography filtered from the BlackBerry network, and other nations are sure to have demands of their own in the next few weeks.

Most likely, this will just mean headaches for RIM and more overhead operating overseas. They’ll no longer be able to boast such a secure network, except to corporate users with their own data centers who should be unaffected. But realistically, most BlackBerry users won’t be affected. Consumers who use it domestically (in the U.S., Canada, Europe, etc) don’t care about what’s going on in the UAE or Saudi Arabia or India. Corporate users will be on a corporate server if it matters to them. But now that RIM has caved to the UAE and Saudi Arabia, they will have to cave to other nations’ requests too.