Officials from the UAE and Saudi Arabia recently declared that some services of BlackBerry and smartphones would be banned as authorities cannot to monitor message exchanges of their citizens, reports Al-Jazeera. The device encrypts the users' data and stores it on the servers of Research in Motion (RIM), BlackBerry's maker in Canada. National and local governments thus cannot access the information circulated by these smartphones.

The UAE's decision to ban the BlackBerry will go into effect in October, while Saudi Arabia announced that it would block the BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) function immediately. Lebanon declared that it would be conducting its own review of the devices a few days later. According to Al-Jazeera, the “encrypted data transfer services have raised fears they could be used for crime, terrorism or even espionage.”

“The impending bans have been met with anger from BlackBerry users, who have accused the authorities of censorship, explains Al-Jazeera. Some technology experts pointed out that other governments have been monitoring BlackBerry communications.

“There are certainly countries all round the world, including the US and the UK, where governments have said that they want this sort of interception capability,” commented Ian Brown, a senior fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute. However, the United States and the United Kingdom have laws in place regarding privacy protections, while experts are concerned because the Middle Eastern countries do not have similar laws.

Analysts suspect the ban is most likely an attempt to control the flow of information in conservative societies, concurs The Drum. Media content and websites deemed to carry un-Islamic content or stoke political unrest are regularly blocked.

BlackBerry users in the UAE and Saudi Arabia are messaging each other to plot alternative modes of communication, including reverting to using proxy servers, anonymous forums and emails in order to evade censors. In Saudi Arabia, young people use BBM to communicate with members of the opposite sex covertly as a form of dissent in the conservative Islamic country.

Tariq Alhomayed, Editor in Chief of Asharq-Alawsat, points out that Saudi Arabia and the UAE, which are home to the largest number of BlackBerry users in the region, were also the fastest to announce a ban on their use. But neither the Emirates nor Saudi Arabia were able to clearly explain the rationale behind their decision to the public.

“The BlackBerry ban was not related to young people becoming addicted to the devices, but a broad sector of the economy will be influenced by the closure of the service,” warns Alhomayed. Foreign workers and visitors will also be affected by the ban, raising further concerns.

Kuwaiti officials are likely to follow Saudi Arabia and the UAE with a ban on certain BlackBerry services, reports Arabian Business. According to a report in Al-Rai, a local Kuwaiti newspaper, the country’s Interior Ministry raised the possibility of a block on services due to security concerns last month.

The news site adds that officials wrote to BlackBerry makers RIM, requesting a central server located in Kuwait in order to monitor data. They have yet to receive a response.

Thomas Shambler, the Dubai-based editor of the Middle East edition of Stuff magazine, said to Al-Jazeera that misgivings were not surprising given the history of state-backed telecommunications surveillance in the region.

"Last year Etislat [a national mobile-service provider in the UAE] sent out a text message to lots of its users," he commented. "That text message led users to download spyware."

The editor said that Dubai's BlackBerry users are “more concerned about losing access to their services” than about censorship and government monitoring. Shambler argued that surveillance will ultimately be a thing of the past, as technology is developing so rapidly.

Political activists in Gulf nations are also affected by the ban, reports Reuters. They claimed that BBM service boosted their ranks. Currently, they are attempting to discover new ways to evade the authorities.

While the number of users utilizing the service for political activism is uncertain, activists commented that such ranks are growing. "It brought us new people we hadn't reached before. Not everybody uses the Internet but everyone uses the phone," said Nabeel Rajab of the Bahrain Center for Human Rights, who used BlackBerry to attract a few thousand online followers.

Activists in the United Arab Emirates argued that political dissent may have prompted the ban. "When BlackBerry came, I started to get messages criticizing the government from people I'd never seen involved in activism. Regular people started discussing taboo subjects," said Ahmed Mansour, a UAE blogger. "It widened the circle of interest."

Messenger campaigns in the UAE have included critiques of state officials and attempts to organize protests, notes Reuters. The news site adds, “Across the Gulf, governments are revealing various concerns, with Bahrain cautioning against using the BlackBerry to distribute local news, while Kuwaiti officials are calling for a block on pornography.”

Saudi Arabia is working on servers that may make it easier for authorities to monitor BlackBerry traffic while the UAE is sticking thus far to plans for its sweeping ban. "This will definitely impact the level of activism until a secure alternative is found. Until then, I guess we are back to Facebook," said Ahmed Mansour, a UAE blogger.