Blackberry surveillance
Thursday, July 16th, 2009It should never surprise anyone that a government wants to occasionally watch it’s citizens for law enforcement purposes. The methods of surveillance change with time and technology of course, and it appears that the United Arab Emirates has just crossed a new threshold – using spyware to spy on people’s blackberries. Etisalat, one of the regions’ major telecom providers, provided a new patch claiming it was to improve performance. It turns out the patch included spyware, which, once activated, would report all activities performed on the BB back to a central server. Due to a programming glitch, the “patch” also ran down the blackberry’s battery at an alarming rate, which bothered many users. After a few days of silence, Etisalat issued a statement which must set records for government non-denial denials claiming only that “a conflict in the settings in some BlackBerry devices has led to a slight technical fault while upgrading the software of these devices.” The users and the loca media of course know better.
