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RIM Co-CEO Cries 'No Fair' On Security Question
bulled writes "When asked about letting governments in Asia and the Middle East into the 'secure' message service used by their BlackBerry devices, Mike Lazaridis, the co-chief executive of RIM, walked out of the interview and said, 'We've dealt with this, the question is no fair.' By 'dealt with,' we can only assume he meant: 'been paid handsomely to let governments read what they wish.'"
It's your right to walk away from an interview at any time. There's not even anything wrong with it unless you've specifically promised to answer all questions.
However, this was still pretty rude and even silly of him. Some choice information-poor statements would probably have been much more effective than this - now it's been on the Slashdot and more importantly on the BBC News front page. He could just as well have said "we're doing something shady you don't like."
"It is not fair to ask us why we are putting our profits ahead of our customers' security needs."
Palm trees and 8
I think we can safely assume that Blackberry is about as secure as a wet paper bag in countries where the device has become "commercially successful" and the government is less than interested in maintaining privacy.
Mentioining "national security" at the end of the video is a clear sign that RIM has well and truly given in on their claims of absolute security for the sake of maintaining a moderately-successful business.
Never trust the security of communications where the keys are being handled by someone outside your organisation.
whats not fair is RIM backdooring their product to appease third word oppressive regimes.
You can't advertise a service or a device as being secure, and then sell the keys to the locks to the highest bidder. Fuck RIM. I hope they burn. My wife wanted a blackberry on this last go round of upgrades. Nope.
Some questions really arent fair. Yes or No questions that imply things, for instance.
Were you raping that underage transvestite midget crack whore last night?
So you are saying that it wasnt rape.
"His name was James Damore."
Goes to show that if you want security, use something you control. I don't want any government or corporation (benevolent or otherwise) with keys to my data.
There's just way too much room for abuse. You have to assume anything that a third party has keys to isn't secure.
Sent from my PDP-11
He'll just avoid the whole question. Instead of, perhaps, explaining why the word used was unfair, and what was being done about the situation.
Guess it's easier to just whine like a little kid about things being unfair, and when that didn't work, to pull out the "national security" trump card.
Not that I was seriously considering a blackberry, but there's no way I'll buy anything from RIM now. I don't like whiners.
Disclaimer: I'm Canadian but I own an iPhone, not a Blackberry. I saw the clip previously and didn't even know what he was talking about, and just thought it was exceptionally bad manners to walk out of a BBC interview. Now that I know that the question was about allowing foreign governments spy on foreign citizens, I find his response even more rude. Answer the damn question, man. If you are ashamed of what your company is doing then maybe you should find another job.
Well, sure. You have the right to walk away anytime. You have the right to walk out of class, out of work; unless you're in prison or the military, you always have the right to walk away.
But how can he not anticipate this question? Its been the number 1 question of RIM for the last 24 months, and he thinks its *unfair* he was asked about it?
He's either naive or an idiot. In either case, he was unprepared for an interview if he wasn't ready to talk about RIM's #1 issue.
If I was a major shareholder, he wouldn't impress me.
The RIM CEO called an end to an interview when he realized (after a minute and a half) that he was just being ambushed with a combative line of questioning. The interviewer had no interest in him answering the questions, he just wanted to make the CEO look bad in order to get ratings. This is, unfortunately or fortunately, rather common in british television. But in this case, it does seem genuinely unfair.
The interviewer knows that governments demand access to people's communications. All American telcos give call logs and e-mail histories pretty regularly to the government. Same with British ones. In this case, *we* don't trust the Saudi's with our communications, yet we somehow trust the US government with them.
Blackberry spent a lot of money building up a successful business in the middle east. Then they had to take their entire business offline while they added these backdoors for the government. When the king holds your entire business for ransom, with the requirement that you do for them what you do for every other government out there, you do it. Whining and complaining about RIM's "security problems" is just childish. And ambushing the CEO on film in an attack segment to make him look bad for something that he, and everyone else was forced to do, is definitely not fair.
The ______ Agenda
Does the person posting this really think that RIM is happy to hand over data to foreign governments? They make their money off of business users who will not be happy about this change. They simply have no choice when governments say give us access or we will ban you. I don't know hope anybody could think that it is in RIM's business interests to make its valuable business customers' data available to foreign governments.
It's your right to walk away from an interview at any time.
True. However if you are the CEO of a major international corporation and you cannot handle a reasonable, politely asked question from a major international media organization you are in the wrong job.
When the king holds your entire business for ransom, with the requirement that you do for them what you do for every other government out there, you do it. Whining and complaining about RIM's "security problems" is just childish.
what the fuck does the above even BEGIN to mean ?
so, if a king holds your business ransom, you can do ANYthing, and its ok, and those who question unethical doings, are 'childish' ?
'whine' word usage is attention-catching there. so, now when someone complains about unethical dealings of a 'business', it becomes a whine ?
what kind of fucked up reasoning is that ?
really. are you a fucking moron, or a troll ?
no, no, dont excuse the rough language. since you shattered the barrier to ethics on grounds of 'business needs', i had had taken the liberty of shattering the barrier to ethics of civil correspondence, on a random ground of my choosing.
Read radical news here
In this case, people aren't angry by the fact that RIM chose (it's a choice; the other option is to cease doing business in the respective countries) to cooperate with authoritarian regimes, but rather by the fact that their CEO does not, apparently, have the balls to admit that they do, and just cries "unfair!" when asked a straightforward question.
His statement at the end of "this is a national security issue, turn that off" is the obvious smoking gun. This strongly suggests RIM are providing backdoors for Saudi and Indian governments (otherwise he could have just said they weren't), and clearly RIM either do not want to talk about it (or are legally enjoined from doing so).
In some sense, the CEO is being honest. He could have just denied it was happening. So kudos to him.
But the problem runs deeper. Saudi, for instance, has a corrupt government with a history of human right abuses. People could end up being tortured or killed for exercising what we regard as basic human rights, just because they trust RIM's platitudes about privacy. This creates a strong ethical obligation to ensure that these people know that their communications are subject to government intercept. I personally think RIM could and should do more.
Honestly, now, let's just play the devil's advocate here.
Everyone knows now that RIM allows middle eastern governments to read whatever. Maybe that admission isn't such a bad thing- I mean, it's disclosure and it's honest. They're being open and honest about potential issues with their service, therefore allowing their customers to make an informed choice.
I mean, who would you rather trust? Company A, who says "Yes, with proper warrants and the like, your government- the one you chose either by democratic process or by inaction against tyranny- can read whatever they want. They have to ask us to provide it and we do. This means if you're planning to assassinate the King of Unspecifiedistan, it's probably not a good idea to SMS it to your friend, since you'll go to prison in short order."
Or Company B, who says, "Nope! Our stuff is 100% secure. Completely safe. No security holes exist now, nor will they ever. Your secrets are safe from the government if you give them to us! If you wanna shoot the King of Unspecifiedistan, this is the place to yak on about it!"
Let's be real about this for just one second. RIM is a very (very) large company with a huge legal team and a vested interest in their customers privacy, yet the governments in question still got to them.
Do you honestly think that other (smaller) companies haven't got equally bad, or worse, backdoors in their systems?
And if you acknowledge that fact... where would you rather make sensitive communications? On a very crowded, very busy, large network which presumably has millions of messages to filter- where one single message might slip through the cracks, or be accidentally labelled a false positive... or a much smaller network without such a (presumably) unwieldy system?
Check out my sci-fi book "Lacuna" at http://goo.gl/MVxX8
No, it's like you sell bananas, but the USA says you can't anymore unless you can tell the government how to remove the skin without the end user knowing. You damage the brand and the business model (security) by caving in.
Instead of walking out, he could have replied with a "no comment" or "I've addressed that question already" and ask to move on. The Co-CEO got very defensive and ended the interview. If you're the head of a major corporation, you're going to have to field tough questions at times. Some of them might not be fair. But that's why they are supposed to get the big bucks.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
By dealt with, we can only assume he meant 'been paid handsomely to let governments read what they wish.'"
Tell me why you get to assume that.
Honestly, if you're angry because RIM, or Google, or Microsoft, or whoever isn't trying to stick it to every dictatorship, you're an idiot. If the US government goes and tries to say a dictator is being too mean (perhaps by killing them), they're the terrible World Police. But if RIM refuses to do the same thing, you get angry. You're an angry, fickle group of people.
RIM is Canadian. I'm Canadian. Canadians don't do the World Police thing. Canadians do the Constable Rescuing the Kitten thing. Now, in this case, RIM is rescuing the kitten, then selling it to the dodgy-looking restaurant on the corner. We Canadians don't like that.
Worse, by walking out on the BBC (the BBC!) they're acting impolitely. In Canada, acting impolitely results in terrible punishment.... Well actually, it mostly just results in frosty stares - we're too polite to actually punish someone. But those stares, man - we can stare frostier than just about anyone. Except the Russians. The Russians are pretty frosty starers. And the Swedes. Their stare is actually known as The Frost.
Mod down if you disagree.
That would be rude and unfair. As a Canadian, I'd much prefer to tell you to take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut instead. I'd prefer it, but as a Canadian, I'm limited to suggesting that you kindly launch yourself toward that fallen dessert and embrace it with passion and vigour.
... And have a nice day!
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
Whilst this may be the case in the US (and I am not sure that it is) it is most certainly not the case at the BBC.
Interview subjects would never be given "a list of questions". They may be provided an overview or outline of the areas to be covered but a list of actual questions would not be provided.
A dream is good. A plan is better.
Called a double binding question. By answering it, you are agreeing to the first part. Those questions are not fair, I also submit neither is enabling governments to read my customers email. Thank god I don't have to make those decisions or be in interviews.
They come in the dark, only in the darkest.
If - say - Charlie Sheen joins the cast of a Broadway show, and agrees to sit for an interview, he'd be an idiot not to expect questions regarding issues proceeding the show.
A large part of RIM's value-add is their security. That security was compromised in certain parts of the world. If the RIM CEO has new h/w to show off, and agrees to sit for an interview, he would be an idiot not to expect questions regarding that compromise. He had the option to address it directly, to talk around it, or to try to b.s. through it. Whether he was "ambushed" or not, cutting off an interview with the MSM isn't a good display of the value a US$1m executive is expected to provide.
Luke, help me take this mask off
If I were a RIM shareholder, I would be dumping their stock and not looking back. The last leg that they had to stand on in the enterprise market was their reputation for security. It seems that more and more corporations are embracing ActiveSync for their Exchange to smart phone email conduit. Hell, even Apple licensed ActiveSync from Microsoft and incorporated into iOS. If that is not handing writing on the wall, what is?
I work for a pretty security conscious corporation that has a lot of legal liability for keeping client data secure. Our laptops are running PGP FDE, we have to use VPNs for practically everything, the only USB drives we can plug into the corporate machines are IronKeys, etc. I figured we'd be one of the last places to ever ditch BES, but the mandate just came down a couple of months ago. By 2012, everyone is going to be on an iPhone or Droid. RIM is going to be out about 5000 BES licenses. We can't be the only one deciding to ditch RIM.
What else does RIM have left? Some cheesy "Playbook" that they are hoping can compete against the iPad and Android? Yeah right.
On top of all of that, their top level executives cannot even handle a curve ball question during a televised interview. That ship is sinking, fast.
bbc has a habit of asking hellish questions.
you think this single question asked by click, a i.t./internet show is hard ? wait until you see some dastardly figure get fried in hard talk - and its not frying as in the 'frying' of silly american shows -> they ask SO shattering questions that you may see politicians blabbering, speechless, and trying to talk by babbling in absolute silence, aghast at the weight of the question.
this is the blonde man that does the majority of hard talk though. there is a woman who occasionally hosts it, but she is apparently not witty enough as the blonde host, and instead tries to bog down her guests by talking too much, and being a prick by not letting them answer.
the blonde guy would ask something like "why did you compromise morals and ethics of the country you are based in, in order to do business in another", and the rim ceo would start babbling in this case, and when gets "but isnt it hypocrisy?" answer to his babbling, he would be dumbstruck.
few dare to sit on that chair. those who do sit, go through the hoop of fire and come out clean, get big p.r. points.
Read radical news here
In Soviet Russia All Backdoors ARE RIM(med)!
Be seeing you...
RIM is Canadian. I'm Canadian. Canadians don't do the World Police thing.
Um. WW1. WW2. Korea. Cyprus. Golan. Bosnia. Kosovo. Somalia. Afghanistan. Haiti.
I can tell you're Canadian - you don't know shit about our history, or our current events. Most people here are WAY too focused on the US.
And you must be from Ontario: not even the ghost of a sense of humour.
Would you kindly launch yourself toward that fallen dessert and embrace it with passion and vigour?
... And have a nice day!
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
So why not simply say that instead of walking off? That to me says it's a big issue and they don't have an answer.
Is the keyboard on the Blackberry really that much better?
Most BB users will tell you it absolutely is. We had a heck of a time getting people to move off of Blackberries on onto other devices for this very reason.
In my experience, the keyboard is really better than most other phones. The OS and navigation gimmick (whether ball, pad, or wheel) are only meh at best. But they do work, are pretty resilient, and the BES makes them great from an enterprise standpoint (though other phones can be managed via Good, Trust Digital, or other products as well.)
(Iphone cannot synch appointments to MSexchange)
Wrong.