BlackBerry hands over user data to help police 'kick ass,' insider says

They are now called Blackberry Limited, not RIM.

I think you need to ask the company (or government agency) for their keys to decrypt their conversations over the BlackBerry system.

The consumer-mode BlackBerry stuff has long since been open to law enforcement, but the corporate communications are locked by the corporations themselves, and only they have the keys.

BBM (a consumer-level Facebook Messenger type app) is not BES (the mobile security system for corporate/government enterprises that BlackBerry theoretically does not hold keys to).

It would be like when Microsoft turns over Live Messenger and Skype IM's to law enforcement and people said "well, I guess no company will ever buy/use a Microsoft Server again". And yet, companies still buy Microsoft Servers.

That difference doesn't make this any less bad. But I wouldn't expect any major fallout from it either.

Indeed same year I'm recorded in a townhall meeting asking about QA and same manager saying, yes we will be doing that down the line.

Some brilliant and amazing technical people there in my time but darn, some serious seagull management types who failed to fly away. Interestingly most bad management I find have no technical background. Though have known good managers who had no technical background, they are rare and none at RIM that fitted that niche.

For me I feel they used Dilbert as an inspirational guide for running a business at times.

There soon won't be any Blackberry to buy anyway…

For example, you can now get the Chicago's mayor's phone records by requesting it through their IT department, who asks the phone company to parse their billing logs, which includes the phone records.

Two tabs, and still a work in progress (waiting for their dns resolution logs now for the next step): https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1hgG79eIr8MbkjYrCvcTR...

A warrant?

Blackberry was a great company once, with wonderfully generous founders that donated tens of millions of dollars to fundamental physics research. No longer.

Now the Blackberry PRIV is PRIV until they say it's UNPRIV. That sounds like false advertising to me. I feel downright sorry for their customers in repressive countries.

There have been quite a few stories lately about their sales doing terribly. I wouldn't be surprised if this leak was some kind of purposeful act of desperation to drive sales by ingratiating themselves with their government and corporate accounts that see this as a feature. For shame.

I looked this up. Seems to be in the US, and also, it's just some guy using personal drugs, albeit for profit. Shouldn't even be an offense, let alone something for police to "kick ass" in.

BlackBerry will turn over BBM messages in the same way that the phone company will turn over SMS messages, and Microsoft and Yahoo and Google will turn over email messages.

All of those companies have to operate within US law. The controversy here is related to how BlackBerry is cooperating with less-friendly foreign governments.

If we're open about it nothing is really secure anymore. Nothing can really provide us with security atm, i would even hesitate to trust a company like blackphone.

I side towards abstiance, use an older dumb/feature-phone thats less likely to have backdoors (downside is its less likely to have the latest security updates). Dont send revealing photos, dont carry a gps tracker with you. Remove your presence for the web, stop providing companies with all your data (facebook etc) and actually meet people face to face for your conversations.

The only argument i can think of against the above is that people want to listen to their music and audiobooks on the go. Simple solution, get a feature phone which can support that or accept that your life is now open to everyone who wants to know everything about you.

Well, you did say people not monsters.