Rules are rules in Saudi Arabia. India and UAE may be in talks with RIM about the BlackBerry service security issue, but KSA has it all sorted out. BlackBerry services was banned in the country this Friday after a short notice. Many users were in trouble due to this sudden ban. Saudi Arabia is RIM’s biggest market in the Middle East with more than 700,000 subscribers, and the CITC had told all three operators, STC, Mobily and Zain, to block the service or face a 1.3 million dollar fine. The commission said BlackBerry doesnt meet its regulatory criteria and licensing conditions.
Going by the reports the disruption lasted only about four hours and messenger was working again after that. An official at the commission told the AP on Saturday that RIM intends to place a server inside Saudi Arabia, and that the server would let the government monitor BlackBerry data. Nothing from the CITC or RIM themselves yet, so thats one official talking. Funny, because RIM keeps saying it has never provided “anything unique to the government of one country” and cant hand out a copy of a customers encryption key. All that data sits encrypted on servers in Canada.
UAE still has that October 11 date for messenger, email and browsing, and India is still asking. If KSA can settle it in a day, whats the hold up?? We’ll be watching, stay tuned.
Partly reconstructed with AI. This post’s full text was lost when the site went offline. Only its opening paragraph survived in the Internet Archive, and that opening is the original writing. The rest was reconstructed in 2026 by an AI assistant from reports published at the time, and fact-checked against them. Sources used: aljazeera.com, nbcnews.com, nbcnews.com, foxnews.com, france24.com.
