BlackBerry's Security Approach Leads to Theories of Secret Deals - NYTimes.com - 0 views
-
R.I.M. officials flatly denied last week that the company had cut deals with certain countries to grant authorities special access to the BlackBerry system. They also said R.I.M. would not compromise the security of its system. At the same time, R.I.M. says it complies with regulatory requirements around the world.
-
law-enforcement agencies in the United States had an advantage over their counterparts overseas because many of the most popular e-mail services — Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo — are based here, and so are subject to court orders. That means the government can often see messages in unencrypted forms, even if sent from a BlackBerry
-
“R.I.M. could be technically correct that they are not giving up anything,” said Lee Tien, a senior staff lawyer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco group that promotes civil liberties online. “But their systems are not necessarily more secure because there are other places for authorities to go to.” When China first allowed BlackBerry service in the last few years, sales were restricted to hand-held devices linked to enterprise servers within the country. Many security experts say Chinese security agencies have direct access to all data stored on those servers, which are often owned by government-controlled corporations.
- ...1 more annotation...