BlastProcessing
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https://news.vice.com/article/exclusive-canada-police-obtained-blackberrys-global-decryption-key-how
Oh RIM. You scamps. Tell me again how your phones are the pinnacle of security.
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....
And if the global key is still sitting on a server in the RCMP's headquarters, the potential consequences could be significant. Although it wouldn't offer police a backdoor into most of its government and business clients, who make up BlackBerry's core constituency, it would mean that police enjoyed years of access to Canadians' personal cellphones without the public being any the wiser.
Oh RIM. You scamps. Tell me again how your phones are the pinnacle of security.