Pakistan to shut down BlackBerry services on "security" grounds

A leaked memo suggests BlackBerry's encrypted messaging will be shut down.


Pakistani authorities are planning to shut down BlackBerry's secure messaging services in the country towards the end of the year, citing national security reasons.

A leaked memo dated July 22 from the Pakistan Telecommunications Authority (PTA), seen by ZDNet but its authenticity can't be immediately verified, purports to show minutes from a meeting a week prior, calling on three of the largest major cell phone providers to shut down BlackBerry's encrypted messaging service (BES).

www.wired.co.uk

"Due to serious concerns by the security agency, Mobilink, Ufone, and Telenor Pakistan are requested to offer 90 days notice as per the existing provisions to their BES customers for closing their BES connections, and ensure that all BES connections of their customers must be closed by or before November 30 without fail," the official memo reads.

The named cell providers were asked to submit compliance reports due at the end of the month.

Citing an official at the PTA who asked not to be named, Reuters also confirmed the news.

There are thought to be only a few thousand BES customers in the country -- most of which are government or business users, or attached to foreign embassies. But authorities are concerned that criminals are also using the encrypted service, which cannot be intercepted, amid almost daily terrorist attacks and abductions from both domestic threats and foreign fighters.

The country remains on high alert following recent bombings and numerous gun attacks in 2014.

News of the shut down comes just days after British civil liberties group Privacy International said Pakistan's main intelligence branch was pushing for greater surveillance powers.

In a blog post, the privacy watchdog said the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency was moving to "tap all internet protocol (IP)-bound communications traffic entering or travelling through Pakistan and corresponding monitoring capacities."


"It means capacitating the country's most notorious intelligence service to spy on more of the country's citizens and expecting it to police its own actions," the post read.

It's not the first time BlackBerry has faced being shut down by a government.

The Canadian smartphone maker's secure messaging service has faced disruption in India, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates, and Indonesia, after their governments expressed concern that criminals and terrorists were using the service.

BlackBerry spokesperson Kara Yi said in an emailed statement: "BlackBerry provides the world's most secure communications platform to government, military and enterprise customers. Protecting that security is paramount to our mission. While we recognize the need to cooperate with lawful government investigative requests of criminal activity, we have never permitted wholesale access to our BES servers."

When asked to comment specifically on the reported upcoming Pakistan ban, Yi declined to comment further.

Representatives from Mobilink, Ufone, and Telenor Pakistan did not respond at the time of writing.(www.zdnet.com)

Why do we keep expecting robots to kill us?

digitalbuzz101 - A man died in an industrial accident at a Volkswagen factory in Germany Wednesday. Normally, this would have been little noted — industrial accidents are unfortunately common, with an estimated 4,000 workplace deaths every year in the U.S. alone.

But this man had the misfortune to have been killed in the process of installing safety software on one of the factory's robots.

www.independent.co.uk

The news flashed around the world, every headline a variation on the classic "man bites dog" — Robot Kills Man. To make matters more ominous, one of the reporters tweeting about the story was the Financial Times' Sarah O'Connor — who was apparently unaware of the Terminator franchise featuring her namesake, Sarah Connor, and didn't understand why so many of her replies talked about something called Skynet becoming self-aware.

Never mind that the robot in question was a relatively prosaic piece of machinery, a giant arm designed to operate within a cage, far away from humans. Never mind that, according to the preliminary assessment, the worker was at fault. Never mind that since the first robot-related death was reported in 1979, we've seen fewer than one such incident per year. Toilets, zippers and pants all cause more deaths than robots.

But we see what we want to see, and apparently what we want to see is the robopocalypse.

This fear-filled approach isn't limited to industrial robots. Witness the scare headlines that greeted news, back in May, that Google's fleet of 48 self-driving cars have been involved in 11 accidents during 6 years and 1.7 million miles of road-testing.

None of these accidents resulted in anything more serious than a bended fender. And crucially, none of them were found to be the fault of the self-driving vehicle. It was human drivers doing the side-swiping and rear-ending. A few of the accidents were the fault of the driver that's required to be behind the wheel of the autonomous vehicle.

In short, we're the menace. We're the danger. We're attacking robots, not the other way around. Not even the most advanced artificial intelligence has that kind of ability; they may never be smart enough to commit murder. So why are our heads stuck in Skynet-style scenarios?

Science fiction plays a role, of course. Our "exaggerated expectations and exaggerated fears about robots" are due to people who have been "oversensitised by sci-fi movies and stories in the media," Bristol Robotic Laboratory Professor Alan Winfield suggested to the Financial Times.

This has been going on ever since 1921, when the word "robot" was first introduced to the language in the science fiction play, R.U.R., which featured a machine revolt that killed every human on Earth but one. (Sorry, Terminator fans, but James Cameron's plot for the original movie wasn't entirely original.) Killer robots and computers also cropped up in Metropolis, 2001 and many more movies.

But that wasn't the whole story of sci-fi. Isaac Asimov stories such as I, Robot were incredibly sympathetic to the cybernetic (the movie version, not so much), as was Steven Spielberg's A.I. And of course Star Wars gave us droids we cared desperately about. Why then do we persist in behaving like the bartender at the Mos Eisley cantina, who doesn't serve "their kind" in here?

What we're really talking about is a primitive urge that goes back far further than 1921. It's what drove the first Luddites to smash mill owners' machines in Manchester — the fear, not of the technology itself, but of its impact in the workplace. We fear replacement. We fear becoming obsolete, itself a kind of death.

That's a legitimate concern, and we need to have that conversation. Industrial robots, computer software and online algorithms are squeezing humans out of jobs every day. What do we do about that? What kind of protectionism, if any, should be in place? How do we re-educate and train our workforce?

It's not a sexy question, and you'll definitely get more attention if you talk about Skynet and the rise of the robots. But the more we pepper ourselves with that kind of distraction, the less self-aware you'll actually be.(mashable)