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BlackBerry Hands Over User Data To Help Police 'Kick Ass,' Insider Says (www.cbc.ca)

Posted by msmash on from the breaking-trust dept.

Reader Dr Caleb writes: A specialized unit inside mobile firm BlackBerry has for years enthusiastically helped intercept user data -- including BBM messages -- to help in hundreds of police investigations in dozens of countries, a CBC News investigation reveals. For instance, citing a number of sources, CBC says that BlackBerry intercepted messages to aid investigators probing the political scandals in Brazil that are dogging suspended President Dilma Rousseff. The company also helped authenticate BBM messages in Major League Baseball's drug investigation that saw New York Yankees star Alex Rodriguez suspended in 2014. One document obtained by CBC News reveals how the Waterloo, Ont.-based company handles requests for information and co-operates with foreign law enforcement and government agencies, in stark contrast with many other tech companies. "We were helping law enforcement kick ass," said one person.

5 of 144 comments (clear)

  1. In before Blackberry shills by LichtSpektren · · Score: 4, Interesting

    As difficult as it may be to believe, BlackBerry has an intense cadre of shills (or perhaps rabid insane fans) that pollute every Internet article they can find which sheds a bad light on BB.

    For us normal humans with functioning brains, we're just waiting for when BB goes under, hoping they sell their patent for a physical keyboard to a respectable Android OEM.

    1. Re: In before Blackberry shills by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

      BlackBerry already has gone under. All articles about them are "In Memorium".

    2. Re:In before Blackberry shills by theshowmecanuck · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Then, they got lazy

      I call this "Novell Syndrome." Many people here might not remember that at one time Novell built the absolute best LAN server software around. But they got big heads and refused to improve. They wanted to keep LAN administration an arcane art and were killed by Microsoft. Microsoft was to area networks as Apple was to smartphones (and whether you hate Microsoft or not, their server software is now ubiquitous). People wanted certain features and Microsoft/Apple listened while [RIM|Blackberry]/Novell didn't. Now anytime I see a company die because they got too full of themselves, I call it Novell Syndrome.

      --
      -- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
    3. Re:In before Blackberry shills by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Then, they got lazy

      I call this "Novell Syndrome." Many people here might not remember that at one time Novell built the absolute best LAN server software around. But they got big heads and refused to improve. They wanted to keep LAN administration an arcane art and were killed by Microsoft. Microsoft was to area networks as Apple was to smartphones (and whether you hate Microsoft or not, their server software is now ubiquitous). People wanted certain features and Microsoft/Apple listened while [RIM|Blackberry]/Novell didn't. Now anytime I see a company die because they got too full of themselves, I call it Novell Syndrome.

      It's not that Novell didn't improve, in fact a lot of modern AD copied a lot of the feature from Netware 4's NDS. In the late 90's/early 2000's, Netware 4's directory services were miles ahead of Active Directory in terms of both performance, functionality, reliability and scalability. It wasn't until XP that AD even became a contender, and, realistically AD didn't reach NDS's versatility until server 2008, and there are still aspects of AD that don't match the versatility NDS.

      Novell's biggest problem was that they were hampered by the fact the Netware 3 rocked. DOS and Windows 3.x/9x clients (aka: The DOS client) were solid and reliable. The servers were bullet proof. Sure, it was "only" a file server, but at the time, that's all the vast majority of people needed. When companies started looking at replacing Netware 3, they were probably looking at Netware 5 or Active Directory.

      Which brings us to Novell's 2nd biggest problem: Netware 5. It was based off of SuSE Linux, so the servers were stable, but the core of NDS was not, it was a good thing that NW5 had good clustering capabilities because something would crash all the time. They abandoned all of their native tools for NW4, and rewrote them in Java for NW5. And they sucked, as they were both slower they were not feature complete. you still needed the old NW4 applications to configure the server the first time out of the box. And, to add insult to injury, if you had a problem with getting the licensing files to work, you needed to go back and use a NW3 tool to get it to take. And unless you were an old hand at NW3, you would not know about said tool.

      Another thing was that a Netware server by itself, couldn't do anything other then host NDS functionality. You couldn't get on the machine, set up NDS and then run Quake on it. Windows 2000+ you could, so it was easier for people to learn on (Remember, at the time you really needed to spend about $1,000 for a machine that approached usability, and to have to buy 2 would be out of most students reach)

      Speaking of reach, Microsoft also let you get the server versions of the OS for a 60-180 day trail period. Netware? You had to spend around $1,000 for a 5 user license.

  2. Re:All three customers will be disappointed by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Interesting

    Wasn't there a Slashdot article discussing a rumor about Apple reportedly handing iOS source code and signing keys to the Chinese government, while putting up a show of resistance to a much narrower request from the FBI. Not sure about the veracity of this assertion, but if it is any way true, it really destroy's Apple's arguments, and shows Apple is no white knight.