The latest news from the United Arab Emirates (UAE) is that it has reached an agreement with RIM (NASDAQ: RIMM) and has called off a BlackBerry ban. If left in place, the ban would have taken effect on Monday and affected 500,000 customers in the region. The official word, from the company, is that RIM has cooperated and services are now "compatible with the framework legislation."

Based on earlier reports involving India and Saudi Arabia, it would appear that RIM will be placing local BlackBerry servers where the UAE government will be able to access the data. This has yet to be confirmed by RIM. Regardless, businesses that make use of BES should still remain protected, based on RIM's earlier insistence that it has no access to the corporation encryption keys.

RIM emailed CNET the following statement, "RIM cannot discuss the details of confidential regulatory matters that occur in specific countries, but RIM confirms that it continues to approach lawful access matters internationally within the framework of core principles that were publicly communicated by RIM on August 12." 

Indeed, the company noted that there are no changes to the security architecture for its BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES) product, which funnels encrypted data stream to corporate BlackBerry smartphones. Of course, the implicit meaning here is that the consumer-centric BlackBerry Internet Service (BIS) is no longer as secure as it was--in the above countries, at least.

Given the many reports on this issue, it is hard to imagine any terrorist would use BlackBerry for communicating when he could switch to another means of protected communication.

For more on this story:
- check out this article at CNET News
- check out this article at eWeek
- check out this article at Enterprise Mobile Today

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