Pakistan is about to shut down access to BlackBerry’s secure messaging services due to unspecified “national security concerns”, according to media reports from the country.

Pakistan’s Express Tribune obtained an unverified memo (.PDF) that was purportedly leaked from the Pakistan Telecommunications Authority (PTA), which allegedly shows the minutes of a meeting that took place one week ago. In that meeting, the country’s three largest mobile carriers were asked to close access to BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES), a product that delivers encrypted email among other services.

According to the document, Pakistan’s Ministry of Interior was also present at the meeting, and instructed the nation’s main telcos to stop offering the service from December 1, citing the aforementioned national security concerns.

The Express Tribune speculates that Pakistan’s authorities are worried that it’s impossible to track the origin of messages sent via BES. It also seems that Pakistan’s intelligence agencies are unable to decrypt said messages, hence they’ve decided to ban the service.

Khurram Mehran, a spokesperson for the PTA, told the Express Tribune that BES has between 4,000 and 5,000 users in Pakistan, and that they’re being given sufficient time to find a new service (that the intelligence agencies presumably can track).

The order to ban BES was later confirmed by The Wall Street Journal, citing Pakistani sources.

It’s not really clear what’s going on here. It’s well known that Pakistan faces numerous security threats, not least from Taliban-linked militants operating in the country’s largely lawless northern areas. But these problems are exacerbated by a security service that is often accused of pursuing its own agenda, separate from the government. Which means it’s not even clear where the order came from.

Interestingly, the BES shut down comes just days after Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency was reported to be pushing for greater surveilance powers. UK-based civil liberties group Privacy International said in a blog post the ISI was working to “tap all internet protocol (IP)-bound communications traffic entering or travelling through Pakistan and corresponding monitoring capacities.”

Such a move would give the notorious agency the ability to spy on Pakistan citizens’ communications, without any kind of checks and balances on its use of that power, Privacy International said.

BlackBerry has experienced similar problems in other countries. India, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have all disrupted or expressed concerns that BES could be used by terrorists and criminals to keep their communications secure.

Given BlackBerry’s recent pivot towards enterprise-grade mobile management and security software, the company will no doubt be disappointed to lose yet another market, even one as small as Pakistan. But still, there could be advantages from being able to boast that BES is so secure that one of the world’s most powerful intelligence agencies is unable to crack it.

“BlackBerry provides the world’s most secure communications platform to government, military and enterprise customers,” said BlackBerry spokesperson Kara Yi in a statement to ZDNet. “Protecting that security is paramount to our mission. While we recognize the need to cooperate with lawful government investigative requests of criminal activity, we have never permitted wholesale access to our BES servers.”

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