Indonesian government threatens to shut Blackberry services down

Blackberry phones are pretty popular over in Indonesia and it seems that the local government has picked up on that fact. So much so that they’re threatening to shut down RIM’s Blackberry Messenger and Internet services in Indonesia because the company has declined to establish Blackberry servers within the country.

At the moment pretty much all BBM data is being handled by the datacenter’s in RIM’s headquarters in Canada, and naturally with all that messaging going about, local governments would definitely want to get in on that citing security as their reason. This is precisely what Indonesia’s telecoms regulatory agency, BTRI said, claiming “the data exchanged is not safe.”

Other countries such as Saudi Arabia and India have tried pulling a similar stunt on RIM citing the same reasons but so far RIM has not caved. It looks as those this is a fine line between security and privacy, so it’s really hard to say if the government is trying to play Big Brother or if they are genuinely concerned over the security of BBM.