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Private enterprise never misses an opportunity to diminish our rights in the pursuit of profit.  The CBC reports from the Kingdom of Saud:

“Saudi Arabia and the Canadian makers of the BlackBerry have reached a preliminary deal on granting access to users’ data that will avert a ban on the phone’s messenger service in the kingdom, Saudi officials said Saturday.

The agreement would likely involve placing a BlackBerry server inside the kingdom to allow the government to monitor messages and allay official fears the service could be used for criminal purposes, the telecom regulatory officials said.”

What is all the fuss about?  Well apparently, the BlackBerry uses some pretty nifty encryption, making emails and documents send via BB hard for governments easily decode.

“That will guarantee the kingdom’s ability to see communications and data exchanged on BlackBerry handsets, he said. Al-Mohammed said talks were ongoing and declined to provide more details pending an announcement, which he said was expected soon.”

Saudi Arabia often sets the tone for the rest of the Middle East when it comes to issue such as this, now other countries are coming to RIM with similar demands.

“The deal could have wide-ranging implications for several other countries, including India and the United Arab Emirates, which have expressed similar concerns over how RIM handles data.”

Of course, the profit motive handily pushes aside any sort of privacy concern private citizens may have.

“RIM is quite smart. They’re seeing this is a very lucrative market. They don’t want to take themselves out of this market,” he added.”

Woo haa!  That is exactly how long it takes for industry to flush your rights down the crapper.

I suppose one should not be too worried, Saudi Arabia make no airs about being democratic or protecting the rights of its citizens.  They were going to shut down the BB service if RIM did not do anything to “fix” the privacy problem.  So perhaps this is the best compromise that could be worked out for all involved.  I imagine there is a tech fix coming to add another layer of encryption so the Saudi business people who use the BB can continue to work with minimal government interference.  And so the privacy/public security race continues…

What I find interesting about this story is the conflux of several important issues regarding privacy and how intrusive the state can be with regards to ‘protecting the national interest’.  I think we need to come down on the side of the individual’s privacy.  The state does not need to know the contents of my personal messages sent over the Internet (they already do for the most part, but for arguments sake).

I agree there are many strong cases to be make for the state’s right to know, for instance tracking down people planting bombs in schools and coordinating via the Internet.  The problem is that, people who use the Net for such nefarious activities will not be communicating via the normal means, they will be using their own cryptography or codes to send their messages.

The sweeping measures (see Patriot Act) implemented will not stop half-way smart, dedicated people.  I wager they snap up the stupid ones all the time, so we get a measure of protection versus the incompetent.  I do not however think the privacy loss the for great majority of us is worth protecting us from the Stupid.

I hope that the Saudi point of view on this issue is not mirrored through out the world, as it would be a detriment to reasonable private communication everywhere.