A while ago, I published a story about a report that the BlackBerry platform was not as secure as they make it out to be because cops could get access to encrypted data on the device. That was refuted by BlackBerry and the issue went away.
The issue is back and it appears that these reports may have been right all along. Court documents obtained by Vice Canada and Motherboard Canada relating to a 2011 Montreal gang murder case reveal the RCMP has intercepted and decrypted more than one million BBM messages in connection to a set of investigations called Project Clemenza. The documents claim that the RCMP has a server that is capable using the “appropriate decryption key” to intercept and decrypt messages sent between consumer BlackBerry devices. Note that I said consumer devices. If you have a BlackBerry on a BlackBerry Enterprise Server, the RCMP doesn’t have access to your messages.
Maybe. These days anything is possible.
In any case the documents also imply that this access was given to them by BlackBerry. Now this is completely plausible as a BlackBerry blog post from last year criticized Apple for its unwillingness to cooperate with law enforcement agencies. But it also really puts a dent into their security street cred as one has to wonder who else they might be working with.
Expect this story to gather steam.
UPDATE: One other thing to consider is the fact that the RCMP may still have this key and can in theory snoop on any consumer BlackBerry user at any time. That is something that BlackBerry needs to speak to immediately.