Page 337 - DMGT308_CUSTOMER_RELATIONSHIP_MANAGEMENT

Customer Relationship Management

Notes The encryption key developed by BlackBerry’s manufacturers was partly designed to
ensure secrecy during corporate business deals as so they were not compromised.
Now consumers have jumped on the BlackBerry bandwagon, this poses a wider issue for
less-developed or funded intelligence services.
As a criminology student focusing and specialising in areas of terrorism, specifically the
use of technology within terror organisations and the use of social media, I can see this in
two minds in regards to this:
1. RIM wants to ensure user privacy, but of course wouldn’t want a terror attack to take
place at any given place or time.
2. India also wants to prevent such terror attacks, but it’s losing the battle by not being
able to read highly encrypted data.
India faces a multitude of terror threats, just as many fast-developing economies and
countries around the world. The increased use in technology to better communications in
order to orchestrate acts of terror is clearly being used as the rest of ordinary society does.
India’s intelligence services need to be able to access encrypted data to prevent attacks in
a ‘constant setting’: where attacks are likely and have occurred regularly. The ability for
governments to intercept or read data sent to and from their citizens is common place in
Western societies.
The NSA for the US and GCHQ for the UK are two common examples of these. But better
resources and technologies allow encryption to be broken - regardless of RIM’s
intervention or preventative measures.
The US and the UK have had very few terrorist attacks since September 11th, as a benchmark,
though not proving a connection between intercepted data and preventing attacks, but
makes the case more likely.
Text messages are not secure. Phone calls are not secure. Emails sent via Exchange and
POP/IMAP are generally not secure, though BlackBerry emails are considered so.
BlackBerry Messenger, however, is secure. It’s so secure, that though China has state
controlled press and broadcasting media, along with issues of censorship and Internet
filtering, even data sent across BlackBerry Messenger cannot be read by the Chinese
government. This, of course, makes it highly popular with their booming younger
generation of users (so a RIM spokesperson told me).
With consumer privacy being a constant hot topic, especially in the rise of publicly available
data and the need to share your own information to gain others - social networking being
a prime example, the individual right to privacy of communications takes personal
precedence.
So interestingly, it boils down to diplomatic tit-for-tat. I am fully aware that my own
government of which I helped in democratically electing monitors my communications
in a secure, fair and justified way. Though my government expects a terrorist attack, we
haven’t had a successful one since the 2007 Glasgow Airport bombing of which no civilians
died.
One civilian beat the living crap out of a flaming terrorist though.

But those in an area of uncertainty around terrorism and national security, the need to
accept certain ‘breaches’ in civil liberties are almost necessary to prevent societal damage.
Of course, there is a line to be crossed, and only local culture can determine that as so.
Contd...

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