Police Say They Can Crack BlackBerry PGP Encrypted Email (sophos.com)

schwit1 writes: Police in two countries have claimed that they can read encrypted data from BlackBerry devices that are being marketed as having "military-grade security." The story originally broke when Dutch website Misdaadnieuws (Crime News) published documents from the Netherlands Forensic Institute (NFI), a Dutch law enforcement agency, stating that police were able to access deleted messages and read encrypted emails on so-called BlackBerry PGP devices. A representative from NFI confirmed that "we are capable of obtaining encrypted data from BlackBerry PGP devices," according to a report from Motherboard. On Tuesday, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) also told Motherboard they can crack encrypted messages on PGP BlackBerrys.

Comments

Re:There's a reason...

[LichtSpektren]

PGP works great for Linux users. If I had to make a guess as to why it's not working so great for BB customers, I would just take a stab in the dark and say it's related to the fact that BB's CEO openly defends putting backdoors in phones and computers for "lawful access" by governments.

Why?

[CimmerianX]

I'm curious as to why any agency would announce that it could read these messages publicly? The bad guys now won't use this perhaps? It's akin to the national argument over Snowden revealing the collection of phone records and everyone screaming how the bad guys will now have this info and that put everyone at risk.

Re:Beware of BlackBerry shills

[drew_kime]

2. Law enforcement says "don't use Blackberry because we cracked it". Stress on the "don't use Blackberry" part ?

That's what seems odd to me. Why would police disclose that they're able to do this? Isn't this the kind of capability you'd want to keep under wraps? Almost seems like they want people to avoid BB. I wonder why.

Why does everyone seem to believe this.

[frovingslosh]

I'm no Blackberry fan. I would never trust the company and I sure don't use one. But I'm surprised that everyone just seems to accept the claim. I expect that if there were any secure device out there that several gub'mints would be actively telling people "oh, we can crack that", a message which comes across as "Don't use that if you want to keep your communications private" and ends up steering people to devices that the snoops really can crack. Maybe they can crack it, but if so why tell us about it? I don't have enough trust in any government to believe this blindly.