https://news.vice.com/article/exclusive-canada-police-obtained-blackberrys-global-decryption-key-how
A high-level surveillance probe of Montreal’s criminal underworld
shows that Canada’s federal policing agency has had a global encryption
key for BlackBerry devices since 2010.
The revelations are contained in a stack of court documents that were
made public after members of a Montreal crime syndicate pleaded guilty
to their role in a 2011 gangland murder. The documents shed light on the
extent to which the smartphone manufacturer, as well as
telecommunications giant Rogers, cooperated with investigators.
According to technical reports by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police
that were filed in court, law enforcement intercepted and decrypted
roughly one million PIN-to-PIN BlackBerry messages in connection with
the probe. The report doesn’t disclose exactly where the key —
effectively a piece of code that could break the encryption on virtually
any BlackBerry message sent from one device to another — came from.
But, as one police officer put it, it was a key that could unlock
millions of doors.
Government lawyers spent almost two years fighting in a Montreal courtroom to keep this information out of the public record.
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