The first ever BlackBerry Developer Conference outside of North America will be held in Nusa Dua, Bali, Indonesia this Thursday and Friday but the country’s Information and Communications Minister Tifatul Sembiring has suddenly threatened Research In Motion that it will ban its BlackBerry services before the end of January unless the Canadian company meets his demands.
On Friday the Minister declared that he will stop RIM from offering its services in Indonesia before the end of January unless it disables access to pornographic contents from its devices. The Minister himself is an avid BlackBerry user.
He demanded on Friday that no BlackBerry user in the country should be able to access porn. He claims that the local operators have implemented the required filters but since BlackBerry Internet Service is routed through RIM’s own private network, RIM is responsible to do the same.
Indonesia has a strict pornography law which effectively criminalizes anyone who possesses and/or distributes contents deemed to be pornographic. At the beginning of Ramadhan last year, the Minister boasted that his initiative had managed to block 90% of all the world’s porn from being accessed in Indonesia. A claim that is grossly inaccurate as online pornography is still even now easily accessible in the country without having to use any sort of workaround.
On Sunday, through his Twitter account, @tifsembiring, he outlined his seven demands for RIM. Daniel Tumiwa who runs 7 Langit immediately responded. 7 Langit is an Indonesian Blackberry software development company which happened to have won the rights to develop the official BlackBerry DEVCON Asia application.
The Minister’s demands are:
- For RIM to recognize and abide by the country’s laws regarding pornography,
- Open a local representative office as it already has more than two million subscribers
- Operate local service centers to provide after sales and repair services,
- Proportionally recruit and absorb Indonesian workforce
- To use Indonesian software and content as much as possible
- Implement filtering software to block pornographic access
- Build servers and repeaters to allow local law enforcement agencies to monitor and run criminal investigations on its network
Tumiwa then said RIM has already opened its Indonesian office and established PT Research In Motion Indonesia back in October last year in an event which was attended by Canada’s Finance Minister Jim Flaherty, while Tifatul Sembiring himself was apparently not present.
The company also already has had more than a dozen service centers by the end of 2010 and will expand to more than 30 in 2011. There are apparently only two non-Indonesians working at RIM’s Indonesian office according to Tumiwa, one of which is Canadian Andrew Cobham, President Director of the company.
He also took the time to explain to the Minister that RIM is not a content provider but a handset maker and service provider. RIM created the operating system, but third party developers are responsible for creating apps and in the case of RIM’s own BlackBerry App World, it already bans pornographic content.
As for criminal investigations, he continues, all the government and law enforcement agencies need to do is approach RIM with a memorandum stating the requirements. Regarding this last point, as it happens, a similar situation is happening with Twitter.
The US Department of Justice had just sent Twitter, Inc. a subpoena to release the details of each of the more than 600 thousand followers of the @wikileaks account.
When it comes to suspicion of criminal activities, perhaps the Minister could look into the practice of issuing a similar document through the country’s own Ministry of Law and Human Rights to RIM rather than requesting to openly roam the network which breaches the privacy of every Blackberry Internet Service subscriber.
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