[Cryptography] Canadian Police Had BlackBerry’s Global Decryption Key since 2010

[John Levine]

>> Exclusive: Canadian Police Obtained BlackBerry’s Global Decryption Key
>....

>In the US this risks the "exclusionary rule".   If the key was "stolen" ...

Blackberry (formerly RIM) is headquartered in Ottawa.  It's a pretty
safe assumption that the RCMP had the key because RIM gave it to them.
If the key were stolen, and RIM knew about it, which they clearly did,
you'd expect them to do a key roll.

Also, Canada is not the US.  The Canadian Charter of Rights and
Freedoms promises the right to be secure against unreasonable search
and seizure, and has an exclusionary rule, but it's not absolute like
the US rule and courts use a balancing test to decide whether to admit
evidence.  The case law is thin, and it's not clear what a court would
do with messages decoded by the RCMP.  My unlawyerly guess is that
since RIM can decode the messages and responds to orders to produce
messages, the incremental harm to a defendant of having the RCMP do it
directly would be seen by a court as low if the cops could show that
they had some other basis for suspicion.  If it was from pure trolling
through private messages, that would be bad.

R's,
John