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Canadian Police Have Had BlackBerry's Global Decryption Key Since 2010 (vice.com)

Posted by msmash on from the how-secure-is-BlackBerry? dept.

Justin Ling and Jordan Pearson, reporting for Vice News: A high-level surveillance probe of Montreal's criminal underworld shows that Canada's federal policing agency has had a global encryption key for BlackBerry devices since 2010. The revelations are contained in a stack of court documents that were made public after members of a Montreal crime syndicate pleaded guilty to their role in a 2011 gangland murder. The documents shed light on the extent to which the smartphone manufacturer, as well as telecommunications giant Rogers, cooperated with investigators. According to technical reports by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police that were filed in court, law enforcement intercepted and decrypted roughly one million PIN-to-PIN BlackBerry messages in connection with the probe. The report doesn't disclose exactly where the key -- effectively a piece of code that could break the encryption on virtually any BlackBerry message sent from one device to another -- came from. But, as one police officer put it, it was a key that could unlock millions of doors. Government lawyers spent almost two years fighting in a Montreal courtroom to keep this information out of the public record. Motherboard has published another article in which it details how Canadian police intercept and read encrypted BlackBerry messages. "BlackBerry to Canadian court: Please don't reveal the fact that we backdoored our encryption," privacy and security activist Christopher Soghoian wittily summarizes the report. "Canadian gov: If you use Blackberry consumer encryption, you're a "dead chicken".

2 of 62 comments (clear)

  1. Re:I thought this was common knowledge? by Carewolf · · Score: 4, Informative

    No, they only had the keys for the consumer parts, which is the same problem all messaging services that doesn't allow you to run your own server has.

    In theory you could secure BlackBerries but it always required an enterprise license and running your own servers with your own keys.

  2. Re: And the Democrat President and Sec of State... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Informative

    I see the rulers of /. Are still conservatives. They endangered the country, but Powell and Rice did more.