Why BlackBerry Is Leaving Pakistan at the End of the Year

Faced with a government request to install "back doors" in its software, Canadian smartphone company BlackBerry said it will leave Pakistan and cease its operations in the country by the end of the year.

According to BlackBerry, the Pakistani government was trying to force the troubled manufacturer to modify its Business Enterprise Server (BES) software so that it would allow the government to spy on users' communications.

As Motherboard previously reported, the Pakistan Telecommunications Authority announced in July that telecom companies in the country must block BlackBerry's encrypted BlackBerry Enterprise Servers (BES) no later than Monday, November 30, 2015, citing only "serious concerns."

According to an announcement posted to the company's blog late Sunday night, BlackBerry states that the Pakistani government moved this date back to December 30 only after the company's down-to-to-the-wire exit announcement, which was posted on Monday morning, Pakistan local time. BlackBerry will remain active in the country until that date.

"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," BlackBerry's post states. "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."

Watch more from Motherboard: All the Ways to Hack Your Phone

Pakistan has a history of undermining virtual privacy. In 2011, the government banned the use of virtual private networks, or VPNs, which encrypt users' connections, shielding them from eavesdropping, and allows them to browse with an IP address other than their own. In 2015, the Pakistani government's requests for Facebook user data shot up by 52 percent, an all-time high.

"Although the Pakistani government's directive was aimed only at our BES servers, we have decided to exit the market altogether," BlackBerry's post states, "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."

BlackBerry, which has fallen on hard financial times in recent years, was once prized above its competitors for its security. In 2006, during a dispute with a patent-holding company, the US Department of Defense filed a brief stating that BlackBerry's continuing presence in the US was crucial for national security because of the large number of government users.

Now, relative newcomers like Apple are doing most of the grandstanding when it comes to protecting users' privacy, while BlackBerry's market share is a mere 0.5 percent.

"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," BlackBerry's post says.

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this article incorrectly referred to BlackBerry's BlackBerry Enterprise Server as the Business Enterprise Server. This has been corrected, and Motherboard regrets the error.