Blackberry CEO John Chen posted a blog on April 18 defending the company's core principles in response to what was referred to as an "old case" surfacing as news again.
The "old case," in this instance, happened to be the Canadian police department's access to more than one million BlackBerry devices and their ability to intercept and decrypt the apparently secure messages.
The CEO's post, which says: "When it comes to doing the right thing in difficult situations, BlackBerry's guiding principle has been to do what is right for the citizenry, within legal and ethical boundaries," does nothing to accept nor deny the charges that BlackBerry faces today.
The news resurfaced when the Montreal crime syndicate case, also known as "Project Clemeza," revealed that Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) has obtained BlackBerry's master encryption key, which clearly points toward the company aiding law enforcement, in this case. This key underpins both BBM and PIN messages of every BlackBerry device.
BlackBerry is known to be a digital fortress when it comes to encryption and data security, and continues to be "impenetrable," according to the CEO, who considers the company to be "the gold standard" when it comes to security for government and citizens alike.
Chen also said, "We have long been clear in our stance that tech companies as good corporate citizens should comply with reasonable lawful access requests," which is a clear dig at Apple's recent horn-lock with the FBI over an encryption issue. While Apple has complied with law enforcement requests before, it refused to unlock a device belonging to Syed Farook, one of the shooters in the San Bernardino incident.
In BlackBerry's case, it is currently not clear whether the Canadian police are still gathering information via BBM and PIN messages and if the master encryption key is still valid. While still not admitting anything, Chen refers to its case as something that ultimately took down a major crime organization.
He concluded the defensive blog post by saying that the company strikes a fine balance between right and wrong, especially when it comes to "helping to apprehend criminals, and preventing government abuse of invading citizens' privacy."
Photo: Vernon Chan | Flickr
