Saudi Arabia seek BlackBerry solution

RIM’s Vice-President Frenny Bawa, who arrived in Riyadh on Thursday, announced her complete readiness to provide the Kingdom with a copy of the data to the competent official authorities. Bawa also said that she had come to present solutions.

PRESS RELEASE –

RIYADH: The makers of the BlackBerry were looking into the possibility of using servers in Saudi Arabia on Friday to avert a threatened ban on its Messenger services by Saudi government, which wants access to its encrypted network, a source said.

Despite the uncertainty of the service being clipped on what many Saudis called “a scary Friday” and of reports of temporary interruptions, BlackBerry users were able to access the Messenger service on Friday evening, hours after the Kingdom had threatened to cut it off over concern it might be used to harm national security.

Owners of BlackBerrys in Saudi Arabia waited with bated breath for their Messenger service to be switched off on a day of uncertainty. Most of the temporary interruptions were faced by STC users, while Mobily subscribers faced no such issues.

A source with direct knowledge of the negotiations said talks between maker Research In Motion (RIM) and the Saudi telecom regulator Communications and Information Technology Commission (CITC) had made progress.

“We are testing technical solutions with RIM … Servers to be more exact,” the source told Reuters, speaking on condition of anonymity. RIM officials in Canada have not returned calls seeking comment on the talks.

The source said the two options to resolve the row were servers in Saudi Arabia or a patch that would allow the government access to data in cases affecting national security.

CITC did not say whether it had begun enforcing the ban.

India, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Lebanon and Algeria have all voiced similar concerns that center on access to communications sent through the device. Together, those markets account for about 5 percent of the Canadian firm’s global customers.

The US and Canadian governments have expressed concern about implications from banning such services.

RIM’s Vice-President Frenny Bawa, who arrived in Riyadh on Thursday, announced her complete readiness to provide the Kingdom with a copy of the data to the competent official authorities. Bawa also said that she had come to present solutions.

On Thursday, according to a source, RIM “showed a degree of flexibility that has not been there over the past three months. Progress is being made. We started debating the technicalities of new set-ups”.

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