Why a Blackberry Ban Won’t Affect Privacy
The current Blackberry controversy in the Middle East has been widely reported by CNN and others. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have seemingly just woken up to the security risks caused by Blackberry products providing its users absolute privacy through encryption technology. Privacy online is about other people and governments knowing who you are, but not knowing your browsing history, the content of data transmitted and generally what you do on the Internet.
Blackberry’s predicament may be headline news but for some time there has been a battle between governments and technology companies with regard to the boundaries of personal online privacy which expanded with the growth of the Internet. While Blackberry appears to be the only target, the war against encrypted communications has been going on for years in Iran, China, India, the UAE and Saudi Arabia.
Much of the privacy war has centered on encrypted internet communications launched by an open source encryption technology developed in 2001 known as OpenVPN. VPN stands for virtual private networks. The OpenVPN movement spawned an entire industry. There are now more than 150 VPN services worldwide that market an OpenVPN service that encrypts data sent from users’ computers to servers outside the territorial jurisdictions of these and other countries – OpenVPN connections can be tunneled through any firewall or proxy.
VPNs routinely encrypt VOIP, IM, emails; all data transmitted and change the IP (Internet Protocol address) of the transmitter. The data encrypted is not only unbreakable (NSA military grade level strength) it cannot even be seen by most known sniffer technologies or traced back to the sender. In its current form, OpenVPN is absolute privacy.
Paid and free VPN services account for approximately 12-15 million online consumers, half of which are stated to be on Anchor Free’s Hotspot Shield server network, the largest VPN service. Many VPN services suggest that about half of their subscribers come from the UAE, Saudi Arabia and China. VPN subscribers from these countries use the technology to bypass restricted sites such as adult and gambling but also to read news and go to social networking sites prohibited in their own countries.
Large companies, hospitals and government agencies worldwide use other forms of hardware embedded VPN technology to encrypt communications within the institution’s own network but not accessible to the internet. The secured communications never go out on the open internet but reside within the controlled environment of a closed server network (intranets).
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