[liberationtech] BB in the news again

[liberationtech at lewman.us]

On Tue, Aug 09, 2011 at 02:26:14PM -0400, katrin at mobileactive.org wrote 1.7K bytes in 46 lines about:
:  David Lammy, Britain's intellectual property minister, also called
:  for a suspension of Blackberry's encrypted instant message service.
:  Many rioters, exploiting that service, had been able to organize mobs
:  and outrun the police, who were ill-equipped to monitor it. "It is

Just a thought, the BB messenger service is like any other instant
messaging service where the users all connect and chat through a central
server. In this case, RIM runs the servers. The data is encrypted
between the user and the RIM servers, but not between users. Therefore,
RIM should be able to see all of the text contained in the chats. If RIM
has any sort of logs, they could potentially compile a list of all those
rioting, or hand this data over the UK Police (once requested properly). 

I realize the police are ill-equipped to decrypt these conversations
as they fly through the air from the user's handset to the tower to
RIM's servers.

Another possibility is that the UK police could do basic traffic
analysis of transmissions and figure out what a BBM chat looks like
over the air/tower compared to phone calls to narrow down the set of
people from which to request data.

-- 
Andrew
pgp key: 0x74ED336B