14 DAY TRIAL // Smartphone vendor BlackBerry has provided Canada's Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) with a global decryption key which allowed investigators to unlock encrypted content from any BlackBerry device.
The revelation came to light following a Vice News investigation that led reporters to a case in Canada where RCMP mysteriously unlocked phones belonging to suspects involved in a gang-related murder case.
The crime took place in 2011 near the outskirts of Montreal, and the men who did it were arrested, found guilty and sent to prison. Despite this, for the last two years, investigators and privacy groups fought with the Canadian government at the Supreme Court in Quebec to unseal court documents.
Murder case documents were sealed to hide RCMP & BlackBerry's collaboration
After judges had cleared the evidence for public release, Vice reporters discovered a technical document filed by RCMP which revealed that Canadian police successfully unlocked around one million messages sent between BlackBerry devices.
Case documents revealed that during the trial the prosecutors said that they've obtained some of the incriminatory evidence after "the RCMP server performs[ed] the decryption of the message using the appropriate decryption key." The judge was enthralled by their answer and asked where they got this "appropriate decryption key."
The prosecution declined to provide more details, but technically, there would have been only one place where those keys could have come from: BlackBerry itself.
Privacy groups fought to unseal case documents
Following the suspects' conviction, some of the court case documents were sealed. Privacy groups soon followed with a lawsuit.
During the legal procedures at the Superior Court of Quebec to get this information into the public eye, RCMP and its lawyers cited various privileges and excuses to avoid revealing where the decryption key came from.
The RCMP claimed that revealing this information would damage the key supplies reputation, and it would ruin the police's collaboration with the company.
For a brief moment, judges wanted to publish BlackBerry's global decryption key
Nevertheless, the information came to light, along with the fact that BlackBerry provided RCMP with a global decryption key that works on any BlackBerry device, ever since 2010. According to investigators, this key is still on an RCMP server somewhere.
Superior Court judges eventually sided with the privacy groups and requested the RCMP to release case details to the public. For a brief moment, judges also ordered RCMP to publish the decryption key as well, but they later went back on this decision after BlackBerry objected and explained the damages of such action.
Publicly, both the RCMP and BlackBerry denied that this "global decryption key" handoff ever took place.