Police & MI5 Accessing BlackBerry Messages To Prevent London Riots & Hunt Rioters | BlackBerryRocks.com

Police & MI5 Accessing BlackBerry Messages To Prevent London Riots & Hunt Rioters

August 16th, 2011 @ 1:52 PM | By : Mauricio

While the BBM Shutdown is being discussed by RIM and the UK government, police and MI5 are finding other ways to prevent riots in London. According to The Guardian, police are accessing messages in BlackBerry smartphones that were confiscated from rioters in their custody. By using these confiscated BlackBerry devices police actively monitor and prevent planned and broadcasted riots from occurring.

In addition to the police working on preventing riots, MI5 has joined in on the hunt for the “BBM rioters”. Right now it seems like they’re just using available and confiscated BlackBerry devices to monitor the rioters but apparently they’re still trying to figure out how to break into the secure BBM network for future usage. Gizmodo pointed out that RIM is obligated by law to provide information on rioters using BBM not the actual BBM messages, which is better than just hacking into the network for general monitoring but I’m sure privacy concerns will still be an issue. What do you all think?

via blackberryrocks.com