Pakistan Is Ordering Telecom Companies to Ban BlackBerry Encrypted Messaging

The government of Pakistan is "requesting" that three telecom companies stop providing BlackBerry's encrypted messaging services to customers, according to documents obtained by civil rights group Bytes for All Pakistan.

According to the document, sent by the Pakistan Telecommunications Authority, the request was spurred by "great concerns" expressed by Pakistan's security agency. Specifically, the government wants the companies to "close" customers' connections to BlackBerry's business-oriented BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES).

BES is used by companies to secure their employees' communications. System administrators create their own cryptographic keys, which means that decrypting the communications going through the server is impossible for anyone listening in unless they have the keys, too. There is no "backdoor," or another key, if you will, just for the Pakistani security agency to decrypt communications.

"This demonstrates, at a policy level, that a very large government is willing to ban communications if they can't gain access to it," said Chris Parsons, a post-doctoral fellow at digital rights group Citizen Lab."Maybe it's just Pakistan, and nobody else will do it, but it's certainly a strong change to, 'If we can't backdoor it, then we will ban it,'" he added.

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The US is having a similar debate right now, as authorities continue to argue that encryption backdoors are necessary to bolster national security.

BlackBerry has a long and tumultuous history in the Middle East, and its encryption services have been threatened with a swift banning in the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, although those bans were eventually abandoned. Pakistan has previously banned privacy-protecting virtual private networks, or VPNs, on the internet.

Research In Motion, the Canadian company behind BlackBerry, did not respond to Motherboard's request for comment.

The Pakistani government concludes the "request" by stating that BES connections "must be closed by or before 30th November, 2015 without fail."