Web users in the United Arab Emirates have more to worry about than having just their BlackBerries cracked. - By Danny O'Brien - Slate Magazine:

In 2005, a company called CyberTrustโ€”which has since been purchased by Verizonโ€” gave Etisalat, the government-connected mobile company in the UAE, the right to verify that a site is valid. Here's why this is trouble: Since browsers now automatically trust Etisalat to confirm a site's identity, the company has the potential ability to fake a secure connection to any site Etisalat subscribers might visit using a man-in-the-middle scheme.

Etisalat doesn't exactly have a clean record when it comes to privacy. ... In July 2009, Etisalat abruptly announced a software update on all its BlackBerry customers. Described as a "network upgrade," the application in fact copied all messages written on the device to two private Etisalat e-mail addresses. Research in Motion distanced itself from this clumsy attempt at government spyware, ... providing a counter-app to remove the program.