Privacy, Blackberries and the British Riots

I saw an article last week to the effect that Blackberry was being “blamed” for “contributing” to the uprisings in Britain that were sparked by the police killing of a black man. Why?  Because apparently one of the main modes of communication was not Facebook, not Twitter, but Blackberry Messaging. And Blackberry Messaging is .... gasp! .... secure! Messages cannot be hacked into by what my then teen-age daughter used to refer to as “the parental element,” including various governments.

Research in Motion (RIM), which makes the Blackberry, has run into this issue before, notably in India and Saudi Arabia, where the government wants to be able to intercept messages at will. But the structure of Blackberry messages is such that RIM cannot decrypt them even if it wanted to, which is one of its main advantages over the competition, especially for law firms.

This illustrates the rather schizoid attitude that currently exists toward the right to privacy. On the one hand, people commonly use programs like Facebook and Twitter which offer virtually no privacy and which bend over backward to accommodate government spying. Other cloud-based programs, such as DropBox, have a very bad record when it comes to maintaining the confidentiality of information stored in their services. Google may offer even less privacy and security of your data (and it keeps it forever).

On the other hand, bar associations ethics committees demand that lawyers maintain a “reasonable expectation of privacy” for their clients’ documents. Various approaches that would give a “reasonable expectation of privacy” such as encrypting email, or strong passwords that are frequently changed, have never caught on because they are seen as “too difficult.”

So the bottom line is that Blackberry is alone in offering secure communication in a world where there is virtually no “expectation of privacy.”