BlackBerry & the future of mobile government

By Robin Hicks | 11 August 2010 | Permanent link | 1 comment

It is unlikely that the kerfuffle over the BlackBerry over the past fortnight will do anything but increase the popularity of the devices that brought email to the palms of our hands.

Grievances aired by an army of governments, mostly in the Middle East but also India, China and Indonesia, that they cannot access encrypted content on BlackBerry’s Messenger, email and web browsing services will only provide assurance to the enterprises that use them. Not least some government departments, who were at first skeptical that the devices were not secure enough for them to use.

The Jakarta Regional Planning Board, which impressed delegates at the FutureGov Summit last year with a presentation on how the BlackBerry could be used as a mobile disaster management network, will have been quietly alarmed by the news that Indonesia’s Communications ministry spokesman Gatot Dewa Broto wanted to ban the things.

Broto later denied he wanted BlackBerry services blocked, but said he wanted Research in Motion, BlackBerry’s maker, to build a data centre in Indonesia to get around the problem. With Indonesian sales of the BlackBerry growing by 500 per cent last year, it would be tempting for RIM to do as asked.

However, the laws of branding would suggest that asking BlackBerry to relax its data security would be like asking Google to hand over the source code to its search engine, and the company which made US$4.4 billion in the first quarter of 2010 will have enjoyed some good PR for standing its ground.

RIM’s security policy is very clear: “The BlackBerry security architecture for enterprise customers is purposefully designed to exclude the capability for RIM or any third party to read encrypted information under any circumstances.”

The ease with which government officials use the device has rested on this promise, although talk of BlackBerry cutting deals with a select group of governments (most likely the recent victims of terrorism) to decrypt communications has muddied the waters.

Even so, news of a possible ban in some countries will probably not curtail the use of the BlackBerry in others, says Matt Poelmans of Citizenlink, of the Dutch Government’s Ministry of the Interior. If it did, it would be to take a step backwards for an increasingly mobile government workforce, he says.

“Mobile government is probably one of the most promising roads to Gov 2.0. Especially in countries where many people do not have a computer at home. Almost everyone can afford a mobile device these nowadays. A ban would also limit the further development of commercial services in the fields of banking or ticketing.”

Limits on the use of the BlackBerry would irk those at the highest levels of government. The Dutch Minister of Foreign Affairs, Maxime Verhagen, uses his Blackberry for daily tweets and dialogue with citizens. Recently he complained that his ministry wanted to limit his use for security reasons.