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RIM Helping UK Police Track Down Rioters

Posted by Soulskill on from the there's-an-app-for-that dept.

jfruhlinger writes "Protests against a police shooting in the poor London neighborhood of Tottenham escalated into rioting and looting this past weekend. Initial reports have it that the activity was coordinated not by Twitter or Facebook but by the relatively old-tech method of BlackBerry messaging. Now the official Twitter account of RIM's UK division has announced that it is 'engaged with the authorities to assist in any way we can,' which presumably means that it's handing over messages sent by rioters. Is BlackBerry being a responsible part of British society, or is it overstepping its bounds?"

2 of 343 comments (clear)

  1. Re:There's a line by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    One man's freedom protester is another man's unlawful rioter.

    Of course, it's pretty clear that there was plain stupid rioting going on here, but were RIM there to watch? In fact, do recall that the UK government (through a quango) is censoring the 'web to shuffle kiddie pr0n under the carpet. Now you can say that child porn is so bad, it has to be censored, but while I agree that whoever made such ought to be tracked down and, er, corrected, I don't agree at all on the censorship. Exactly because right after that people will demand other things be censored too -- in fact it's happened in the UK where "parent activists" demanded the 'web be turned into teletubbieland wholesale unless some punter would phone in and ask for the smut to be turned back on, so they didn't have to watch over their underage kids' shoulders while surfing. The problem with that, and your, line of reasoning is that it's not a solid base to make policy decisions on. That line is wobbly, blurry, and vague. It's subjective, even if to most if not all onlookers it was crossed at some point during a particular (series of) incident(s).

    Moreover, RIM is not a police agency and as such does have exactly no investigative powers. Strictly speaking they're not even allowed to mine their own data and if you put it to the information commissioner they might even end up banned from keeping it.

    So I say that they are very possibly overstepping a line here. Exactly because to volunteer data they need to make judgements they're not entitled to make. So I hope for their sake they sweetly asked the plod for a court order demanding they hand over "processed data" regarding the riots or something, or they could (well, should, not many people actually understand how this works) rightly be in hot water for assuming police powers they are not entitled to.

  2. Re:There's a line by TehNoobTrumpet · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    Responding to the first line you read and don't even bother reading the rest of the comment?
    Then telling someone to grow up?
    Need I say anything more?