Additonal reporting by Farid HANNA
The United Arab Emirates are a somewhat strange piece of land: they consist of a few territories each governed by a so-called emir. These emirs are oriented towards the west (radically different to Iran) and tend to grant their (female) inhabitants some degree of civil liberties.
Western countries have had all kinds of surveillance solutions in place for quite some time – and it looks like the carrier Etisalat has now joined the gang.
itp.net reports the following:
…
“They have released it as an upgrade across all UAE BlackBerry handsets, all of which have tried to phone home to this one registration server at the same time, and that has effectively brought the server to its knees. When the BlackBerry cannot register itself, it tries again and this causes the battery drain.”
Gourlay pointed out that by default the system is turned off and when it installs the only message that is sent is an initial registration message, and that later on, Etisalat could turn on the systems “one by one”.
…
Image: Matthias Schwarz for Wikimedia Commons
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the google app does the samething (one or another we all are controlled by someone)
Hi,
yep – but users know what it does!
All the best
Tam Hanna