For those of you who have not been keeping up with the events that have been happening here in the UK, there has been a lot of rioting. This rioting has followed a shooting of a man known as Mark Duggan. He was shot by the police for no apparent reason. Since this event, the riots have been spreading all accross London and into other parts of the UK.
However, the Minister of Tottenham here in the UK has called for all blackberry devices to be banned(including the BlackBerry Messenger). In fact, the minister of Tottenham has put out the following statement on Twitter: “Immediate action needed. LDNers cannot have another evening like last night tonight. BBM clearly helping rioters outfox Police. Suspend it”.
he then went on to say: “This is one of the reasons why unsophisticated criminals are outfoxing an otherwise sophisticated police force.”
“BBM is different as it is encrypted and police can’t access it.”
On a side-note, a hacker group has hacked the Inside BlackBerry Blog and posted the following statement: “You Will _NOT_ assist the UK Police because if u do innocent members of the public who were at the wrong place at the wrong time and owned a blackberry will get charged for no reason at all.
If you do assist the police by giving them chat logs, gps locations, customer information & access to peoples BlackBerryMessengers you will regret it, we have access to your database which includes your employees information; e.g – Addresses, Names, Phone Numbers etc. – now if u assist the police, we _WILL_ make this information public and pass it onto rioters.”
I personally think that to ban the use of BlackBerry would be a bad idea. There might be businesses out there who rely on BlackBerry for their operations and have BlackBerry devices as their only phones. Additionally, there may be other people using blackberry for other such legitimate reasons.