Analysis: RIM, A Canadian Gem Confronts Middle Eastern Scrutiny
By: Freedom-Kai Phillips
Canadian based Research In Motion Ltd. (RIM) and officials from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia are nearing completion of an official agreement to allow the continued operation of RIM’s BlackBerry instant messaging service. The row began over security concerns put forward by UAE and Saudi officials regarding their inability to monitor communications from RIM products. In contrast to their competitors who use public Internet systems with standard encryption, RIM uses a proprietary encryption mechanism and routes all data traffic from BlackBerry handsets globally to their Canadian based data centers consequently blocking government snooping. However, it has been this added sense of security which many in the industry have pointed to as an underlying aspect of RIMs rapid integration into the global business market.
Research in Motion, maker of Blackberry could face a backlash from not just UAE, but Indian, and Indonesian officials as well.
According to multiple news sources, the content of the preliminary agreement brokered by Canadian and American officials centers on RIM establishing domestic servers within the Kingdom to allow regulatory authorities to monitor usage. While the official debates are focused on national security concerns, a subsequent result is a massive hindrance on the social life of Saudi youth. To officials in the Gulf States, BlackBerry’s are being used to wrongfully circumvent government policies be them related to security or morality. Regardless, RIM is feeling the pressure and eyes globally are honed in on Riyadh to see the eventual outcome.
While many analysts consider the situation to be overblown, I am in the minority. If the aforementioned negotiations do not develop a standard to reconcile Saudi concerns, RIM could face a backlash from not just UAE, but Indian, and Indonesian officials as well. There has even been limited talk of RIM asking Canadian officials for their support in utilizing the WTO as last resort – a very politically charged course of action. Furthermore, depending upon how far RIM goes to satisfy Saudi officials, security-conscious business consumers may begin to look for other smartphone options. Ultimately RIM is in a particularly troubling quandary. Bend too little, and face being banded from major business markets; bend too much, and find consumers migrating to other providers to ensure continuity of service.
In the end, RIM will likely bend and establish domestically monitored servers within the Kingdom in hopes that this will quell security concerns. RIM is likely to rebound, but the timing of this debate is problematic as Apple and RIM are engaged in a heated battle over global market-share for smart-phones. Regardless, the positive publicity RIM has received concerning its proprietary encryption mechanism will remain a strong selling point for business travelers. That is, once Saudi and RIM officials find a common ground. Until then, the Kingdom will remain unhappy with their RIM devices.
*Freedom-Kai Phillips is a reseach analyst focusing on business intelligence issues for Info Tech Research Group. He holds an LL.B. from Dalhousie University (Halifax, NS. Canada), a M.A. in Diplomacy and International Relations from the Whitehead School of Diplomacy, Seton Hall University (South Orange, NJ. USA) and a B.S (magna cum laude) from Eastern Michigan University (Ypsilanti, MI. USA).
The “DNT-R2P Connection:” Humanitarianism in the 21st Century?
Filed under: Democracy, Human Rights, Responsibility to Protect, Technology
By: Colette Mazzucelli
The trials and tribulations of humanitarianism in the past decade lead Columbia historian Mark Mazower to question the price of moral leadership in foreign affairs. Is there a local-global consciousness emerging to combat the atrocities states inflict arbitrarily on their citizens? The countries and their cultures differ. The abuse of human rights does not: post-election turmoil in Kenya, 2008; brutality against the protesters in Iran, 2009; longstanding sexual violence against women in war-torn Congo; mass starvation over time in North Korea. The list grows as globalization intensifies.
"Mobile applications, whether on the cell or smart phone, are evolving rapidly as millions acquire new means to communicate", says Mazzucelli.
Can digitally networked technology (DNT) make a difference by slowing the trends of abuse? Is the exponential growth of mobile phone use in the developing world a revolution that allows civil society to find its voice preventing the murder of innocents by state leaders? What does this transformation mean for the West with its interventionist ideals and its international norms, most notably, Responsibility to Protect (R2P)? Are we bearing witness to a sea change that makes “ordinary people” the world over a bulwark of protection against would be political entrepreneurs seeking power at any human price?
Experience taught us in Rwanda the speed with which genocide was carried out by extremists with a political agenda as the West chose selective indifference. Failures to prevent mass murder in Bosnia and Kosovo showed the limits of transatlantic power. If R2P is not to remain too closely linked with intervention, which is one of its main criticisms as a tool to facilitate Western neo-colonial adventures, citizens must assume the responsibility to protect the human rights of fellow citizens. Their actions can make a difference in regimes struggling to find their own way to the constitutional liberalism that checks excesses of state power against individuals.
Mobile applications, whether on the cell or smart phone, are evolving rapidly as millions acquire new means to communicate. The empirical data, which is still limited, informs us that technology can be used to incite ethnic conflict or to deter human rights abuses. Joshua Goldstein and Juliana Rotich discuss the impact of digitally networked technology during Kenya’s 2007-2008 post-election crisis. Their research findings illustrate how text messages incited violence across Kenya. In comparison to Rwanda, however, where radio mobilized the 1994 genocide leaving moderate voices unable to respond, in Kenya, the use of SMS also circulated messages of a moderate nature.
Michael Joseph, the CEO of Safaricom, which is the largest mobile phone provider in Kenya, distributed SMS texts to the company’s 9 million customers to contradict the previous hate messages that had incited mob violence after the 2007 presidential election was believed to be rigged. His effort underlines the multi-directional nature of mobile technology. The Kenyan case also highlights the emerging role telecommunications leaders and visionary designers are playing as tensions between state and society escalate in contested elections. Violence in Kenya also sparked the design by David Kobia and Erik Hersman of Ushahidi, a revolutionary platform combining Google Maps with a tool allowing mobile users to report cases of abuse in precise detail, including images and written observations at the time and place of the incident.
The application of Ushahidi in other countries experiencing human rights abuses makes digitally networked technology, mobile use in combination with blogs, interactive maps, and satellite imagery, the people’s choice in developing countries to forge local-global interactions. There are policy and educational implications for the transatlantic area as we identify a DNT-R2P connection in polities where citizen initiatives redress the heavy footprint of the state. This civic dimension of the responsibility to protect, the agency to act on behalf of human security, must rely on the courage and conviction of local engagement not foreign interventions.
As Barbara Slavin writes, “Internet and cell phone technology have become to Iran’s current democracy movement what the telegraph and cassette tapes were to previous political upheavals.” This is why transatlantic support for public spending to help Iranians evade government Internet filters is a critical element in policymaking. The Iranian people have a right to communicate with each other and with the world through blogs, text messages, and video images. Digitally networked technology offers Iranian citizens a chance to construct alternative narratives, thereby nurturing the internal democracy building that challenges a brutal theocratic regime.
Another area where DNT can support human rights initiatives is in the protection of those working on behalf of NGOs like Peace Brigades International whose members accompany the human rights defenders protecting internally displaced persons (IDPs). Francis Deng observes that digital networked technology provides the “eyes and ears” for the world to make sure that the dangers facing humanitarian workers as well as the plight of the IDPs they defend are not forgotten.
As the use of the mobile increases around the world, another challenge for the transatlantic area is to develop educational initiatives that bring DNT right into our study of global affairs. Innovative curriculum development is evolving as a necessary component of humanitarianism in a model that President John Sexton has defined at NYU as the “global network university.” Its aim is to “maintain human community” as NYU classes, held simultaneously in Abu Dhabi and New York, and networked with other locations in Prague and Buenos Aires, “break the time-space continuum.” The perils and the promise using technology of a multi-directional nature are unprecedented. The policy and educational responses of the transatlantic may help establish a DNT-R2P connection aiding citizens in fragile polities as they protect themselves against oppressive regimes at home.
Colette Mazzucelli, WFI Fellow at Citizens for Global Solutions, is Adjunct Associate Professor, Center for Global Affairs at New York University and Department of Political Science at Hofstra University’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.
Washington Dispatch – Advisors counsel Obama on science and technology
Filed under: Commentary, Domestic Politics, Energy, Environment, Technology
Washington, D.C. – Today I had the opportunity to break out of New York and attend the first meeting of President Obama’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) who met to present the administration with bold proposals to answer America’s challenges. With a membership that boasts the CEO of Google, the President of Yale University, the Chief Research and Strategy Officer of Microsoft, and the President of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, the collective force of their advice to the President is impressive. (see full membership list)
PCAST is an advisory group of the nation’s leading scientists, engineers and innovators which directly advises the President and makes policy recommendations in the many areas where an understanding of science, technology, and innovation are key to strengthening the public policy of the United States. At the outset of the meeting, it was clear that the 100% attendance in the room not only impressed the meeting’s chair Dr. John Holdren, Assistant to the President and Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, but also the decorated researchers, CEOs and President’s who compose the council.
While the morning session focused largely on healthcare, (Google’s ceo Eric Schmidt delivered the entertaining moment of the morning, find out what it was on www.btquarterly.com) the afternoon meetings on the environment and climate change were significant for their honestly and the U.S.’s reborn engagement in the global climate change debate.
Robert Sussman, Senior Policy Counsel at the Environmental Protection Agency told PCAST that “we are at a moment of significant transition…we have a government commitment to address climate change that we have never had before,” citing support from the President and Congress. He raised the prospects of carbon capture and storage technologies, since 50% of US electricity comes from coal and these emissions are a major contributor worldwide to greenhouses gases. This technology would aim to capture the carbon dioxide before it is released into the environment, then compact it into liquid form and store it beneath the earth. Many questions whether this is a “pipe-dream or real” he said, but he stated that he believes it is our only option to continue utilizing our number one source of electric energy in this country.
Secretary of Energy Steven Chu joined the meeting at 5:15 pm straight from the airport, after visiting with the editorial board of the Boston Globe and Havard’s Kennedy School. Predictably, the audience in the room swelled to over-capacity for his presentation. The Secretary’s message to the Council invited them to offer new ways to evaluate and fund research ideas for energy and technology advancements. He began by deriding the negative emphasis that Wall Street analysts have on which companies succeed and which ones flounder. Research and development endeavors take time he said, and funding mechanisms that are more visionary and encourage risk taking must be incorporated in science and technology developments.
Overall, a central theme of the day kept appearing in varied subtle forms and it certainly was not lost on the journalists in the room. The United State is eight years behind where it should be, eight years of public policy must be rewritten and we all must start working on these major challenges without a moment to spare.
