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BlackBerry CEO Promises To Try To Break Customers' Encryption If the US Government Asks Him To (techdirt.com)
An anonymous reader writes from a report via Techdirt that claims the company has "chosen to proclaim its willingness to hack into its own customers' devices if the government asks." From the report: From a Forbes article: "[CEO John] Chen, speaking at a press Q&A during the BlackBerry Security Summit in London on Tuesday, claimed that it wasn't so simple for BlackBerry to crack its own protections. 'Only when the government gives us a court order we will start tracking it. Then the question is: how good is the encryption? 'Today's encryption has got to the point where it's rather difficult, even for ourselves, to break it, to break our own encryption... it's not an easily breakable thing. We will only attempt to do that if we have the right court order. The fact that we will honor the court order doesn't imply we could actually get it done.'"
Oddly, this came coupled with Chen's assertions its user protections were better than Apple's and its version of the Android operating system more secure than the one offered by competitors. This proactive hacking offer may be pointed to in the future by DOJ and FBI officials as evidence Apple, et al aren't doing nearly enough to cooperate with U.S. law enforcement. Of course, Chen's willingness to try doesn't guarantee the company will be able to decrypt communications of certain users. Blackberry may be opening up to law enforcement but it won't be sharing anything more with its remaining users. From the Forbes article: "Chen also said there were no plans for a transparency report that would reveal more about the company's work with government. 'No one has really asked us for it. We don't really have a policy on whether we will do it or not. Just like every major technology company that deals with telecoms, we obviously have quite a number of requests around the world.'"
Oddly, this came coupled with Chen's assertions its user protections were better than Apple's and its version of the Android operating system more secure than the one offered by competitors. This proactive hacking offer may be pointed to in the future by DOJ and FBI officials as evidence Apple, et al aren't doing nearly enough to cooperate with U.S. law enforcement. Of course, Chen's willingness to try doesn't guarantee the company will be able to decrypt communications of certain users. Blackberry may be opening up to law enforcement but it won't be sharing anything more with its remaining users. From the Forbes article: "Chen also said there were no plans for a transparency report that would reveal more about the company's work with government. 'No one has really asked us for it. We don't really have a policy on whether we will do it or not. Just like every major technology company that deals with telecoms, we obviously have quite a number of requests around the world.'"
You'll try to help police get into a protected phone? He should be fired for make that statement.
And the US Constitution and Bill of Rights handicap the US when dealing with countries such as China, Russia, or NK. While the NSA and CIA are subject to daily scrutiny the same cannot be said about US adversaries. You will never see any protesters in China, Russia, or NK demanding details of their countries intelligence agencies.
Yeah and the US Gov is so handicapped by that scrutiny that their rates of regime-changing per decade are lower than China, Russia or NK. And the incarceration rates too.
Without such handicaps the US Gov would have to interfere with democracies by paying for social media ads and fake news/users rather than making up lies and sending US citizens to kill brown people. /s
I've been repeating this for quite a while now, but I dunno for what reason, people have apparently forgotten all about the case involving the Canadian Mounted Police, a master decryption key for all non-enterprise accounts, and extremely crappy response from your same very own John Chen who was also the CEO back at the time.
Let me refresh people's memories:
https://www.theverge.com/2016/...
https://news.vice.com/article/...
http://blogs.blackberry.com/20...
https://www.computerworld.com/...
If anyone was stupid enough to fall into the obvious and very false statement that the new Blackberry had better costumer protection in place in comparison to Apple or other Android brands, it's on you for not doing very basic research.
It's like getting surprized with a new round of scandals of Lenovo laptops having malware pre-loaded on their bios. There have been enough cases to know what the position of the company is. If you are still throwing your money at them, you are just reinforcing the behavior and proving to them that it's acceptable.
John Chen has said nothing there that he didn't already say in the past. While he is the CEO of the company, such behavior is to be expected. Anyone who cares about their own personal privacy and about having proper standards on costumer protection should've already let go of the brand by now.
Aside from petty criminals, I would be shocked that any decent terrorist was even bothering to rely on any kind of third-party to provide their encryption anyway. I mean, that's just stupid.
Use ANY communications medium you like. The same metadata would be present on just about all of them. And encrypt the message before you send it. It's not hard.
Then you know that only the guy with the key can decrypt it and it doesn't matter what Blackberry/WhatsApp/Facebook etc. record - they only get the same metadata anyway. And, also, you could send the message by carrier pigeon if you were that paranoid. It would barely matter.
What we're catching with such stupidity are not the master criminals, but the idiots. The idiots are easy to spot anyway, precisely because they give the game away from the metadata. While the master criminals aren't hindered in the slightest. Meanwhile, all our privacy is stripped away on the inference that we're somehow stopping the master criminals by doing so.
I object to the stupidity, dumbing down, and taking me for an idiot - much more than I object to someone claiming to help the government decrypt if ordered to do so.