Speaking with the AP this past Sunday, Bahrain foreign minister Sheik Khaled bin Ahmed Al Khalifa told the news service that his country would not join Saudi Arabia or the UAE, which have both threatened to pull the plug on certain BlackBerry services over concerns about its encryption security methods.
Along with India, the two Persian Gulf states have taken issue with BlackBerry encryption, which they say could allow people to plan attacks against the state and its government without proper intelligence monitoring.
Sheik Khaled told the AP that Bahrain would not consider a ban on BlackBerry services, citing the benefits of the technology as outweighing the risks.
“We’re not saying there is no security concern” he told the AP in an interview, adding that “there are many other ways for the criminals or terrorists to communicate, so we decided we might as well live with it”.
He also told the AP that his country respects the decisions made by neighboring nations to threaten a ban on BlackBerry services, but that Bahrain has chosen not to deal with the security concerns in this fashion. “We really kind of loose a lot of communication freedom just for the sake of dealing with one matter”, Sheik Kahled said.
It should be noted that since these comments, Saudi Arabia has agreed to delay its proposed ban on BlackBerry messaging services while it works out an agreement with the device’s manufacturer, Research in Motion.
The Gulf state agreed to postpone its August 6 blockage after RIM said it would channel BlackBerry data through servers located in Saudi Arabia, which could then be monitored by Saudi telecommunications authorities.