15 April 2016 – Too often, corporations serve as quiet collaborators for the surveillance state to avoid retribution from the government. Then there is Apple CEO Tim Cook who provided a rare and extraordinary exception to this unfortunate trend in the tech industry by publicly resisting a court order to compromise iPhone security .
And then there is Blackberry.
News broke yesterday via an exclusive piece in Vice News that Canada’s federal policing agency has had a global encryption key for BlackBerry devices since 2010. It was revealed in a stack of court documents (quite hidden; analysts had to do some searching) that were made public after a Montreal crime syndicate case. The documents shed light on the extent to which the smartphone manufacturer cooperated with investigators.
Canadian government lawyers fought mightily to keep this information out of the public record. And while neither the police nor BlackBerry confirmed that the cellphone manufacturer handed over the global encryption key, prosecutors admitted that the federal police service had access to the key.
As the Vice News article notes:
In light of a very public spat between the American FBI and iPhone manufacturer Apple about encryption, and whether or not consumer technology companies should comply with government orders to create new software to help release the keys to the proverbial castle, the Montreal case raises serious questions about the surveillance steps taken by police.
The court record acknowledges in black-and-white that, as part of the process, the police servers performed the decryption of the messages using the appropriate Blackberry decryption key.
It’s a delicious story with all kinds of bits and bobs on how the decryption technology was used, plus “assistance orders” issued by the court that can compel service providers to “assist” the police in carrying out other court orders, like wiretaps or search warrants.
For the full article click here.
