Shirley Christie – The government on Thursday praised Research in Motion for installing filters the day before to block access to pornography through its ubiquitous BlackBerry devices ahead of a state-imposed deadline.
"Communication and Information Technology Minister Tifatul Sembiring thanks God that the pornography content filtering process carried out by RIM on its BlackBerry service has started successfully," a press release on the ministry's Web site said.
The ministry had given RIM until today for the filters to be up and running.
RIM earlier released a statement saying its technical solution had met the ministry's requirements and was designed to utilize the same standard of filter provided by the government to the telecom industry, referring to the DNS Nawala project, a local open-source filtering service created in 2009 by the Nawala Community, a group of Internet users concerned about pornographic Web sites.
Irwin Day, a deputy for public relations at Nawala, told the Jakarta Globe that the group was invited by the ministry to meet on Tuesday with RIM officials and the six operators that provided BlackBerry services in Indonesia. "We were asked if we could solve the problem, so we did," he said.
Irwin, who also heads the Indonesian Internet Cafe Association (Awari), said all of the operators chose to use Nawala's filtering service, the only locally created system available in Indonesia.
"Since then, we've started to block domains related to pornography," he said, adding that the process was still under way.
According to Irwin, Nawala has not been involved in the dealings between the government and RIM, and was only solicited to provide a solution. "I don't know whether RIM will pay for the service or not, but as of now we are providing the service for free," he said.
Gatot Dewa Broto, the Communication Ministry's spokesman, confirmed filtering began on Wednesday at 4 a.m.
Attempts to access pornography on the Web are now being met with a notification saying: "This site is included as one of the sites not allowed to be accessed through this network because it is are shown to contain: pornography, gambling, phishing/malware, SARA or proxy."
Irwin said Nawala received at least 60 e-mails a day reporting questionable sites to be added to its blocking system. "Mostly, it is filtering pornography and gambling," he said.
RIM said it looked forward to continuing its investment in Indonesia and supporting the needs of customers, developers and distribution partners. "We are pleased to have implemented the solution in advance of the date requested by the ministry," it said.
But the Canadian company has yet to meet others requirements set out by the government, including allowing data to be intercepted and monitored and setting up a regional network aggregator.
Heru Sutadi, commissioner of the Indonesian Telecommunications Regulatory Body (BRTI), said RIM had plans to build an aggregator for the Southeast Asian region but had yet to confirm a site. The ministry has lobbied for the aggregator to be built here.
"Indonesia is their biggest market base in Southeast Asia, and we would like them to set it up here so that it will reduce BlackBerry tariffs," Tifatul had told the media on Monday.