Smartphones

The UAE announced yesterday that it will suspend BlackBerry Services to clients starting October 11th, citing security concerns. This includes BlackBerry messenger, e-mail, and web browsing services; there are an estimated 500,000 Blackberry users in UAE.

BlackBerry phones have very secure encryption technology. This presents a challenge for the UAE government, which cannot access information on remote servers. John Palfrey of Harvard Law School, commenting in a piece on the announcement in the Washington Post explains: “The long-range goal is to ensure they can control the information environment that their citizens are living in. This is a very simple story on one level: If you use a certain device, where some information is not stored locally, the worry is that they don’t know what is in that information and how they can get control of it.”

As Sarah Hamdi, writing for the OpenNet Initiative blog explains, this latest news follows a series of crackdowns on Blackberry users in UAE:

Noam Cohen writes in the New York Times that companies routinely compromise freedom for market share. According to Noam, the result of this trade-off begs us to ask whether new technologies — the personal computer, the World Wide Web, the all-powerful smartphone — will help set us free or merely give us that illusion. For every time that technology promises to help introduce democracy, the people's hopes are dashed. As an example, Noam cites the introduction of the Apple iPhone into Egypt: