BlackBerry has always maintained that it fights against governments and agencies that demand access to user data but it appears that the company might have collaborated with Canadian police during a two-year period when one-third of all smartphone owners in North America were using a BlackBerry handset. A report claims that BlackBerry’s master encryption key was obtained by Canadian police which allowed it to decrypted messages sent using the company’s handsets.
Vice News has found the revelations inside court documents related to a crime syndicate case in Montreal. The documents show that BlackBerry and Rogers both collaborated with law enforcement agencies.
The Royal Canadian Mounted Police filed technical reports in court which show that its offers were able to intercept and decrypt over one million messages sent using BlackBerry’s proprietary messaging technology. They are said to have gained access to those messages using BlackBerry’s master encryption key.
It’s not clear in the report where the encryption key came from but attorneys for the government have tried to keep details of this case a secret for over two years. The report mentions that BlackBerry facilitated the interception process, document redactions make it difficult to ascertain any context, the possibility exists that the master encryption key might have been extracted directly from a device by a third-party contractor.
There has been no comment from BlackBerry on this yet so we’ve yet to hear the company’s side of things.
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