RIM In Trouble For Not Violating Privacy

sufijazz writes "The US government is not alone in wanting to snoop on everything citizens do over email/phone. The Indian government wants that right too. RIM is stating they have no means to decrypt, no master key, and no back door to allow the government to access email." The article notes that 114,000 BlackBerries are in use on the Indian subcontinent. The government is concerned about attacks by militants and sees the BlackBerry as a security risk.

Comments

Re:This could set a precedent

[unlametheweak]

Phone companies in the US, maybe elsewhere, are legally required to facilitate eavesdropping under CALEA. End to end encrypted data services such as Skype and Hushmail have escaped this so far. So has TOR and Freenet so far. The German built JAP proxy technology was forced to put in a backdoor for the German police; all completely unannounced until a programmer looked at the (open) source code. Wikipedia has a slightly different interpretation (no back doors, but warrants issued to log IP addresses). To this day there are some very stupid people who believe that "anonymous" services should have backdoors in place to make these services un-anonymous.

I can remember when the PGP creator was put on trial in the US for his subversive software. The American government was smart in dropping the case and thus not setting a possible legal precedent (against themselves), but that was pre-9/11. As Bob Dylan once said "The times they are ah changin'"