UAE Restricts BlackBerry Use For Smaller Businesses

The United Arab Emirates (UAE)’s telecoms authority has announced it will tighten restrictions on Research In Motion’s BlackBerry devices, allowing only organisations with 20 or more BlackBerry accounts to use the secure BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES).

Individuals and smaller groups will be required to use less secure systems, the UAE’s Telecommunications Regulatory Authority (TRA) said.

Industry-wide policy

RIM said that the policy will apply to other smartphone makers, such as Apple and Nokia.

“The TRA has confirmed to RIM that any potential policy regarding enterprise services in the UAE would be an industrywide policy applying equally to all enterprise solution providers,” RIM said in a statement.

BES is favoured by enterprises and government agencies and provides encryption that blocks access by government authorities, while other RIM services such as the BlackBerry Internet Service (BIS) can be monitored.

The policy will come into effect at the beginning of May, according to analysts IHS Global Insight.

The move appears to be the latest attempt by the UAE to find a way of limiting the security problems it perceives in encrypted BlackBerry communications, while stopping short of a complete ban of the kind the government proposed last year, according to IHS.

“The ban looks to be a temporary solution to the problem, it remains to be seen what other possibilities the UAE government could inflict on the secure handset manufacturer,” said IHS analyst Shardul Shrimani in a statement.

There are about 500,000 BlackBerry users in the UAE, which has a population of 8 million.

In October the UAE backed down from a plan that would have seen BES services banned completely from the country.

Wider context

While the UAE has not been the site of public protests such as have taken place elsewhere in the middle east in recent weeks, the country’s smartphone policies are seen as a way of increasing the government’s ability to monitor communications by potentially disruptive forces.

Within the past two weeks UAE authorities have reportedly detained at least three activists calling for democratic reforms.

Authorities in India, Saudia Arabia, Indonesia and Lebanon have also been pushing for ways of gaining access to BlackBerry communications. Terrorists reportedly used secure BlackBerrys to plot the Mumbai attacks in 2008.