Boy meets girl has never been easy in Saudi Arabia, where religious police bar unmarried couples from meeting in public. It may get harder as the state presses Research In Motion Ltd to let it monitor BlackBerry messages.
Many among the country’s growing youth population rely on technology to bypass social restrictions. RIM’s BlackBerry messenger service is one of the most popular means and posting access codes that let users chat with one another on rear car windows and Internet chat groups is a common flirting technique.
Saudi Telecom Co. and two rivals have until midnight to reach an agreement with RIM on how to make users’ data and communications available to security services. The country’s telecommunications regulator may suspend BlackBerry’s instant messaging service unless they agree. If they do come to a deal, RIM’s smartphone may become less attractive to many people.
“I’m not happy,” Khalid Ali, a 23-year-old Saudi who owns two Blackberry handsets, said at a Riyadh shopping mall. “Say I’m inviting a girlfriend to a party, it is not appropriate that anyone knows that. I won’t feel comfortable, even if the service is still there but monitored.”
Governments including the United Arab Emirates, which last week said it plans to shut down BlackBerry e-mail and messaging functions in October, and India have cited a need to monitor calls and e-mails for security. The U.A.E. and Kuwait also cited the need for stricter controls to uphold social mores. Saudi Arabia has said it wants to monitor BlackBerry messages to prevent terrorism and illegal activities.
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Canada’s Trade Minister Peter Van Loan said Aug. 5 that they are working with RIM and regional governments to find a solution that will allow the message networks to function.
‘Evils and flirting’
The growing use of devices like BlackBerry handsets by young Saudis has been criticized by supporters of the country’s traditional Islamic rules, who welcomed the possible ban on its messenger service.
“The best thing they can do in their life is canceling it,” a reader of the Saudi newspaper al-Watan, who gave his name as Faisal, said in a post on the newspaper’s website. “It has only brought evils and flirting in the streets.”
Fifty percent of the Saudi population is aged 24 or below, compared with 31 percent in France, according to figures from the U.S. Census Department.
The Persian Gulf nation, the world’s biggest oil exporter, enforces the Sunni Wahabbi version of Islam. The country bans cinemas and doesn’t allow women to drive on public roads.
Religious police from the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice patrol shopping malls to enforce separation of the sexes and other prohibitions, and can carry out spot-checks of offices.
Monitoring message traffic would give authorities “a whole new set of things to do,” said Gregory Gause, professor of political science at the University of Vermont in Burlington. Still, it’s likely that keeping an eye on domestic opposition groups and terrorist threats is the main motivation, he said.
Opposition groups like the Saudi Civil and Political Rights Association have called for elections and criticized what they say is corruption in the royal family. The country’s dynastic rulers have also frequently been denounced by al-Qaeda for betraying Islam because of their security alliance with the US.
Militants have attacked targets in Saudi Arabia, including a raid on an oil installation and housing complex in the city of al-Khobar in 2004 that killed 22 foreign workers. Saudi security forces said in June they detained more than 2,000 people suspected of collecting money for al-Qaeda or engaging in “Internet activities” in support of the group.
Phone companies
Saudi Arabia’s Communications and Information Technology Commission last week ordered the three phone companies to stop messaging services after a yearlong consultation with RIM failed.
Saudi Telecom, Etihad Etisalat Co, known as Mobily, and the local unit of Kuwait’s Mobile Telecommunications Co, known as Zain KSA, gained a reprieve until the end of today as talks on a solution progressed. RIM representatives in Dubai and London couldn’t be reached for comment Sunday. The Saudi regulator and phone companies didn’t comment.
It is understandable that Saudi authorities want to clamp down on terrorist cells, said Firas Alola, 29, a Saudi comedian and entertainer. He is not convinced that is the only reason behind efforts to monitor the message traffic, though.
“It’s just the last thing in a long list of things that don’t seem right,” Alola said by phone as he headed to Bahrain for the weekend. “It might be used as an excuse to check into what people are doing and saying. I don’t mind any government looking in on my correspondence, as long as I know why they’re doing it.”
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