UN Telecom Chief Urges Blackberry Data Sharing 196
crimeandpunishment writes "The top man in telecommunications at the United Nations is weighing in on the Blackberry battle ... and he says share the data. The UN's telecom chief says governments have legitimate security concerns, and Research in Motion should give them access to its customer data. In an interview with the Associated Press, Hamadoun Toure said 'There is a need for cooperation between governments and the private sector on security issues.'"
TFA is firewalled... (Score:5, Informative)
It says it's an entertainment site. But I found a better source [msn.com] anyway; TFA probably cut and pasted from the AP (or from another site that paid the AP for publication) anyway.
Re:I think I speak for all of us... (Score:1, Informative)
You do understand that US demands the same kind of access? In fact, US agencies already have backdoors made for their in major services and ISP's. Remember when there was a story that one large ISP reduced their costs by just giving direct database access to FBI? Or remember how NSA has huge sniffing equipment at major internet backbones in the US?
Re:I think I speak for all of us... (Score:1, Informative)
There is no technological way to give access to content between a BES and a blackberry. [blackberry.com]
To governments: It's impossible. That's why YOU feel comfortable using it.
Not necessarily (Score:1, Informative)
RIM's corporate clients run their own blackberry servers, and the encryption is end-to-end between the corporation's own server, and the Blackberry devices used by their employees. The encrypted traffic flows through the internet and through servers under RIM's control, but they can't read any of the data without the encryption keys which are generated entirely by the client and are never given to RIM.
This is different from their consumer service, where its RIM itself that runs that blackberry server and so they have access to all of the encryption keys on it and can help governments intercept the traffic at that end.
Because of this, I'm not sure how exactly they plan to comply with the public demands of India and a couple of other countries to let them decrypt and read all of the data. They've stated that they're going to give India what it wants, but I believe that is technically impossible right now. RIM will have to re-engineer their system, deliberately weakening it by adding the backdoors that the government needs (some kind of enforced key-escrow service, or something). It will require software updates on the corporate servers AND all of the blackberry devices, and more importantly, it might REALLY piss off some of their large corporate clients. We'll see.