US has a quiet word with Arabs over Blackberry ban

@bigger_luddite - not my point. It’s not just about US lives, I wrote “lives”. You took what I said and tried to fill in blanks where there were none.

To choose a stance on free speech when it suites you, is hypocritical in the purest form... but nothing is black or white. I'm not going to bother commenting on your other statement because I'm not debating what is right or wrong. I stated I don’t know enough about it to provide a strong and passionate enough argument, so I will defend no stance other than knowing that the document did shine a light on wrongs being committed. Moreover, I cannot help to acknowledge, that leaking documents during war is a touchy area at best. I’m sure it is a difficult decision even for the person that decided to release them, but not as difficult in regard to dealing with the consequences. They cannot be held accountable for their actions like a soldier that must face consequences for disobeying an order from a superior because he feels the orders are wrong. A person in titled have access to such documents would have to face some consequence if found out, they don’t get to be judged… But I digress.

Nevertheless, my point on the whole, was about the article’s representation. Instead of imparting news, the article was held afloat with a lot of strong feelings, opinion (passion even), but sprinkled with fact. It distorts the truth and becomes more persuasive then informative. The author could have been a little more reserved. Staying objective is important, but this article was grasping at straws and was taken to an unlikely place for a tech news site. IMHO the articles angle was not appropriate in regards to content and its classification.

Opinions are best placed in the comments section. I don't mind a little editorial sprinkled in with my facts, but it was too much. I appreciate the writer’s passion; many (including myself ) get upset about war and feel outraged when we find out that human rights are being violated on both sides; I must remind you, I have not engaged in that debate here.

Nick ... you are a genius man.

I can't be arsed to read thru the comments, but i'm sure they are enlightening as always.

Keep up the good work!

I propose the following modest thought experiment.

If the Blackberry were designed and made in China, would the US reaction be in any way different?

If so, why?

I used to work for Tymnet, a commercial network supplanted by Internet and no longer existing. It had a central network supervisor located in California for all of its customers worldwide. But traffic within a country would be routed within a country if there was a path, or rather it was the shortest, ie least cost, path.

Some countries in Europe appeared to object to this though the data security was better than the Internet was and is.

Tymnet had good engineers and one came up with a distributed supervisor architecture but the company's owner - BT - was too close to shutting it down. Tymnet would have required investment as years before it had standardized in an Interdata minicomputer that went away with its maker and so they were doing their own with gate arrays - the penalty for having a few million lines of assembler code. The investment to convert it to portable C wasn't as much as one might think, actually.

But countries insist on being nationalistic - if something is a network supervisor, they want it within the borders but especially not on their neighbor's soil. They are more paranoid about that than the sup being in the US.

Something tells me you're a hypocrite who wanks to pictures of Judith Miller.

No matter. @bigger_luddite got it correct, and you are simply noise.

Hahaha, all those yanks all in a huff because the truth is said, hilarious.
Indeed it's not 'real journalism; since those are all nicely asking what they can and cannot say, that is if their own helpful attitude fails them to figure out what their glorious leaders want them to say.

If US of A is really sincere, it should ask for democracy and equal voting rights for women and minorities instead of blackberry access. Blackberry should instead toe in and move its servers to the the country if it wants their business. Earlier India wanted to ban blackberry on similar grounds as well. Just like Google gave in to china , blackberry will have to give in to get the arab business.

Hey you, monkey, stop with justification of US and NATO military bullshit.

They think it is ok to invade other countries. People from other countries disagree. There is a lot of us outside your backyard who hate US bullying, asshole.

No war in the history was about protection of lives -- you can't protect them by killing people. All wars so far were about pillaging, raping, genocide, land and/or resources.

You cannot ascribe noble and honest qualities to military and war because that is exactly opposite of what they stand for.

Oh, did I say you are moron?

I did? Good, because you are. I would put all of you military types into a large canon and fire you into the Sun.

Isn't the blackberry what Obama refused to give up? Does this mean he can't go to the UAE?

Seriously?

Because it is definitely hypocritical to both protect the free flow of information and freedom of speech of citizens and to protect classified, sensitive information in the military. They both definitely go against each other. Wanting to protect military intelligence and the lives of those who work with it definitely impairs the freedom of the people.

No one is oppressed by keeping military data secret. No one is harmed, and no ones freedom or rights are wronged. The leaked data on Wikileaks will likely lead to the deaths of those who worked with NATO against terrorist forces. The number of Afghan civilians killed is a very small number; the US and NATO have done an amazing job keeping collateral damage as low as it is. It is far lower than any other extended war in modern times. Most of the leaked deaths were also already public knowledge; the damage done by the leak to both NATO's credibility and to the lives of those who helped it cannot be undone, and is far greater than the gain by leaking the few deaths that weren't public knowledge.

Moreover, why do you think that one congressperson calling for the death of leaker means the whole US Government wants to march him out before a firing squad. There are congressmen who think throwing kittens into wood chippers is a fine idea, but that is hardly the official stance of the US Government or its people. Besides, the leaker committed treason on a vast scale; under law he can be sentenced with death. Its not like this is some inhumane act of the US Government; the majority of nations have similar punishments for treason. At the very least I would like him and anyone associated with wikileaks to be charged with assistant homicide for every death that results from the leak. That seems fair to me.

Stop misinterpreting things to make the US, or anyone for that matter, look bad. One expects a certain level of negativity and bias from INQ, thats part of the reason for reading it, but right now you just look like you have not a clue what you are talking about and will get people to stop taking you seriously and stop reading your site.

The leaked documents show the US outright murdering innocent people. Your attempt to reverse it by claiming that (US) lives are merely endangered is contemptible. It's a statement that you don't at all care for the lives of Afghans.

Eh,nothing new from USA. They fu*ked up all the world in the name of democracy and free speech. They been acting like an rich (dumb?) teenage high on puberty for the last, well, forever :-)

A big security hole for sure. Pair this with a huge potential for breach through younger workers' use of social networking sites, and their casual attitude regarding data, asset, and enterprise security, and there’s a real recipe for disaster. Google to a free blog, "The Business-Technology Weave" - it has some great info on security, culture, etc. That author also has a great book, "I.T. WARS." Security should be kept front and center. We assign parts of that book for new employee orientation where I work. Please keep security front and center.

Wow, this is not news at all.

The only information that was valuable in the entire text can be summarized. 'Arab nation (unknown) plans to ban RIM headset device, Blackberry, because they believe it threatens national security by possibly aiding terrorists. US request that they reconsider such plans in light of free speech and to continue an open market'…That is it.

The WikiLeak thing is all together a different thing in regard to freedom of speech. I'll leave it at that because of my lack of knowledge on the details regarding what was leaked and the reason why someone thought it was necessary to leak documents that would endanger peoples’ lives.

Perhaps the timing and the ignorance of people not knowing the details of the leak can make the US politicians look hypocritical, agreed… but that is as much as I will give you with your writing. You sound overly righteous, I just hope you know enough about the incident with WikiLeak to even approach the appearance of credibility you think you have to be so boldly biased.

This is evidence that the US / UK *are* able to tap the communications, probably directly at the servers, and don't want to lose this important asset.

I miss Mike Magee - this website used to be a good source of news.

Nick, this is crazy even for you!

Wow, what a drama queeen!

I'm glad you take such an informed and unbiased approach to the subject matter here.

Pseudo-journalism at its finest, as per usual.