I recently wrote a post for Forbes.com on how Research In Motion has quietly been making deals to provide encryption keys to the Russian and Chinese governments, with India in the queue for a set as well, while the UAE and Saudi Arabia are threatening to kick RIM out of their respective countries unless they get the same access.
My issue with this is not that RIM is abiding by the laws of the nation within whose borders they want to conduct business. That’s what companies do – Google’s dealings with China being the latest example. The issue that has prompted this Project Grey Goose investigation is RIM’s lack of transparency regarding which governments have the ability to monitor their customers message traffic and which do not. That is a critical bit of data for enterprise blackberry users to know who, by virtue of their place of employment, are high value targets for cyber attacks including espionage by state or state-sponsored actors.
Research In Motion executives are invited to provide an accurate accounting at any time. In the meantime, if you’d like to participate in discovering which other countries have the ability to decrypt your Blackberry’s email or other encrypted messages, please let me know via the Contact button on this website.
No comments:
Post a Comment