Bahrain’s foreign minister said the country had no plans to follow its Persian Gulf neighbors in banning some BlackBerry services because security fears did not outweigh the technological benefits.
His comments on Sunday came as device maker Research in Motion Ltd (RIM) is facing opposition by a number of countries around the world, including Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) in the Gulf, to the way its encrypted e-mail and messenger services are managed.
Bahrain’s Sheik Khaled bin Ahmed Al Khalifa told reporters the handheld devices raised legitimate concerns, but that his nation had decided that banning some of the phones’ features was “not a way of dealing with it.”
“We’re not saying there is no security concern,” Sheik Khaled said in an interview.
However, “There are many other ways for the criminals or terrorists to communicate, so we decided we might as well live with it,” he said.
Canadian-based RIM is negotiating with Saudi authorities to avoid a ban on messaging services on the devices, while the UAE is planning an even more sweeping crackdown on the data services starting in October.
Both countries have cited security concerns. Critics contend that the countries, which maintain tight controls on the media, are also motivated by a desire to monitor users’ speech and political activity.
Sheik Khaled said Bahrain fully respected the decisions taken by other Gulf states regarding the devices, and declined to comment on the motivation behind their moves.
However, he said his country — a small island kingdom that hosts the US Navy’s 5th Fleet — did not see a need for a ban on BlackBerry messaging or other data services for now despite the security concerns.
“It’s not a way of dealing with it. We will really kind of lose a lot of communication freedom just for the sake of dealing with one matter,” he said.
Local media in Bahrain have reported that authorities were cracking down on the spread of some types of news and information via BlackBerry.
Sheik Khaled said there were “some concerns raised,” but added that sharing information using the devices remained legal. Authorities were aiming instead to warn users against spreading slanderous and libelous information, he said.
The tech-savvy foreign minister posted a statement to his Twitter account on Thursday last week that he said came from the country’s crown prince, Sheik Salman bin Hamad Al Khalifa. In it, he quoted Sheik Salman offering assurances no ban on messaging was planned, saying a decision to halt the service would be “ignorant, short-sighted and unenforceable.”
Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of BlackBerry users in Saudi Arabia were waiting yesterday for the kingdom’s Communications and Information Technology Commission (CITC) to decide whether to enforce a ban on the smartphones.
The telecoms watchdog had set a deadline of last night for tests of suggested technical solutions that would give authorities access to BlackBerry’s encrypted data.
More 700,000 people subscribe to BlackBerry in the kingdom, most reportedly purchasing the device for personal use.
Local daily Okaz quoted yesterday a technical source at one of the kingdom’s three mobile phone companies as saying that the “tests on the server and requested programs ... have been successful.” However, another official at a telecommunications provider was not as certain.
BlackBerry users were desperately hoping the service would be maintained.
“We don’t care if the service will be monitored, as long as it is not cut,” said a reader posting his comments on Okaz’s Web site.
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