Civics & Pavel Durov
But, crucially, they could not do this in every case. The reasons when they could not were primarily bureaucratic and technical. The drug dealers might have got smart and decided to change the key on their network, and neither RIM or the cops had a device to extract the key from. Or the authorities might want info on a corporate BlackBerry, which was uncrackable by BlackBerry using their existing infrastructure. Or a BlackBerry’s shared key might have been set by the phone company, not RIM, so RIM couldn’t directly co-operate, and needed to refer them back to the telco — who might have just cluelessly bounced them back to RIM. That kind of shuttlecock-up happens all too often, and it’s easy for the tech company to take the blame.
