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Comment by mikestew | Hacker News Reader

Man, this pisses me off so much I'm...I'm...I'm never going to buy a Blackberry! After Chen's comments on the San Bernadino case, I'm not surprised much. I should be outraged or something, but what am I going to do? Petition my government? BB is Canadian, I'm U. S. Not buy a phone I never stood a chance of even considering? Recommend to my boss that she not buy BBs for the team, like she was never going to do? Not write software for BB, just like I've been doing for, like, ever?

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Start by whipping out clever FOIA requests to find information on it. Dig, dig, then dig more. Find a pro bono lawyer who can do a FOIA suit on your behalf. You'd be surprised by how much information you can get so long as you're patient and can cleverly avoid "unduly burdensome" rejections.

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...

> Find a pro bono lawyer who can do a FOIA suit on your behalf

How do you do this?

Wish I could help out here.. I found my lawyer through a friend. Though, in Illinois, FOIA pays out a decent amount if you win a FOIA suit. Finding a lawyer to help out might not be that hard if similar laws exist where you live.

If you can't find a lawyer, find someone locally who knows FOIA very well. Lots of activism and open data crowds have loads of experience with it.

I like your work, hope it gets traction. FOIAs could very well raise some much needed awareness and push back on mass data collection and surveillance practices when government is on the other end of it.

Based upon how narrow of a market they have left, this is probably a game ender for Blackberry branded devices.

The people who are still buying Blackberries won't hear about this.

s/hear/care/

BB users by and large consider government surveillance irrelevant.

>BB users by and large consider government surveillance irrelevant.

And interestingly, every single BB user I know works for the government (I'm in Canada).

I hear you

> I'm never going to buy a Blackberry

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

And I'll still keep not buying Blackberry!

Hopefully QNX can make it out alive.

Call me cynical but I say this is doubtful. Microsoft will probably buy it and kill it. Or the QNX patents will go to a NPE ("patent troll").

At this rate there wont be any blackberry. Also, it was Apple that had resources to fight back. If it was my startup I would have not choice but to comply or shut shop.

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