Pakistan’s government has ordered BlackBerry Enterprise Services (BES) to be blocked, warning of a threat to national security.
The Express Tribune reported late last week that the Ministry of Interior has instructed the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) to implement the ban by 1 December. The watchdog will notify the country’s mobile operators to ensure they no longer offer BES after 30 November.
"The decision to block the BES was taken on the directives of the Interior Ministry due to security reasons," said PTA spokesman Khurram Mehran, in the report on Friday.
According to the regulator, there are only 4,000-5,000 BES users in Pakistan, and with the ban not coming into force until December, those users have sufficient time to migrate to another service.
BES is primarily used by companies for secure, encrypted email, and is controlled by the customer. This poses a challenge to governments that want to keep tabs on their own citizens.
"There was a challenge that the BlackBerry email service could not be tracked or decoded, which leads to the security reasons," said Mehran.
BlackBerry has been threatened with bans in other countries in the past, including Saudi Arabia, the U.A.E. and India.
In the cases of India and Saudi Arabia, BlackBerry averted a ban by setting up local servers in the country that were accessible by the security services. BlackBerry did not disclose the details of the deal it struck to avert the ban in the U.A.E.
With Pakistan being a fairly minor market for BlackBerry, it remains to be seen whether the Canadian device maker will strike a similar deal or accept its fate.
